The following is an excerpt from my new book, which is out on November 3rd.

If one discipline deserves the prize for the greatest ambition in its subject matter, it’s surely anthropology. The name says it all. Anthropology is the study of anthropos—humankind. Even sociology (‘the science of society’), our closest rival, is not quite so immodest in its declared subject matter. Indeed, if any discipline has messianic pretensions about its ability to understand and improve the world, it’s anthropology—as Clyde Kluckhohn makes clear in his 1958 book Mirror for Man, one of the earliest attempts by an anthropologist to explain the field to the public.

According to Kluckhohn, the prevailing view of anthropologists in the 1950s was that they were collectors of cultural oddities,1 ‘interested in bizarre things with which the average person had no serious concern and even the ordinary intellectual felt to be inconsequential.’ Anthropology, he argued, was seen as the ‘science of leftovers’. For Kluckhohn, this view was fundamentally mistaken. Anthropology, in its concern with the nature of human beings, was key to solving the crucial dilemmas of contemporary life. Although I don’t disagree with Kluckhohn’s core premise, I’m nevertheless quite taken with the idea of a science of leftovers—i.e., the stuff considered too mundane, inane or profane for other disciplines to ponder.

This is precisely my goal in this book. In the essays that follow, I aim to talk of many things. But instead of shoes and ships, cabbages and kings, and whether pigs have wings, my interest is in other topics that seem equally inconsequential and nonsensical—like speedos and spittle and how conversations start, and whether a queef is worse than a fart.

The Baggage We Carry is a follow-up to my first collection of essays, Silent but Deadly. In hindsight, this was an unwise choice of title for a book on the underlying cultural patterns of everyday behaviour, given that works bearing the name are typically aimed at kids.2 While farting featured in the book, the media attention it received focused exclusively on this aspect—like an article in the Sun titled ‘Geeky bum time: I’m an expert on farts and have written a book all about why we pass wind’.3 It didn’t seem to matter how many times I said that the book wasn’t just about farting; that’s all anyone wanted to talk about. In any case, I’ve learnt my lesson with the second book.

The title is taken from one of the essays, which is about baggage in its literal sense, although I thought it worked well as a broader metaphor for the content of the book. While it can be read in one sitting, the chapters are intended to work as standalone essays that the reader can dip into and out of as time and interest demand—on the toilet,4 transit and so forth. The essays themselves are derived from posts on my Silent but Deadly Substack, although all have been expanded and updated (with some reworked extensively), and arranged into five themes: hygiene, emissions, language, objects and transit.

The first section focuses broadly on conceptions of hygiene and covers an eclectic array of topics: French rules about men’s swimming attire in public pools, our attitudes towards pubic hair and its removal, debates about urinating standing up, the question of whether baths are less hygienic than showers, and different conceptions of how to get dishes clean. The second section explores our relationship with bodily emissions: faeces, urine, spittle, farts, burps and queefs (a.k.a. vaginal wind) take centre stage.

The third section on language examines insults and complaints and the problems of translation they raise, as well as some peculiarly British features of two core elements of any conversation: greetings and goodbyes. I examine everyday objects in the fourth section of the book, although ‘leftovers’ is probably a better name. Featuring actual leftovers, along with curtains, decorative pillows, mirrors and toilets, I use them as a lens into very different topics: gluttony and restraint, privacy, aesthetics, the self, and postural differences in how we defecate. The final section digs into the everyday irritations of transit—conflicts over cabin baggage, noise from mobile phones, who’s entitled to the priority seats and what happens during delays.

The book derives primarily from my observations and experiences as an Australian who has lived in a variety of other countries: South Korea, the site of my original fieldwork; the US, where I lived for a time as a child and worked for several years; Canada, where I resided for over a decade; and the UK, my home since 2018.5 As I noted in my first book, I expected to be confronted with cultural difference in South Korea, but was less prepared for it in the lands of my Anglophone brethren. In the essays that follow, the UK features prominently, not just because it’s now my home but because I’m repeatedly struck by the differences between the country that birthed me and the country that birthed Australia.

Given the number of times I’ve been asked in media interviews about how I became interested in the topic of farting, the preoccupation with bodily effluvia evident throughout this book possibly requires some elaboration. The fact is that I have been fascinated by our excretions and emissions for as long as I can remember—although more, I should hasten to add, on an intellectual than physical level.6

One of my earliest memories is of entertaining my siblings with a demonstration of how my kindergarten teacher went to the toilet. (To be clear, I’d never witnessed her in the act but had clearly spent some time contemplating it.) This was around the time I learned that all humans excrete waste, information that permanently altered my world view. Until that point, I’d assumed that some people—like Jesus7 and the Queen—were above such acts. That all humans, no matter how wealthy, feted or revered, shared the need to urinate and defecate struck me as a great leveller. Personally, I’ve always thought that our shared humanity is most concretely expressed in our collective hang ups about defecation.

The focus on transit in this book—a relatively new preoccupation—can be largely explained by my change in commute in 2023, which shifted from a bus to the London Underground (a.k.a. the tube). Anthropologically speaking, buses are relatively boring spaces because your primary view is of the back of the head of the person sitting directly in front of you. The tube, on the other hand, is perfectly designed for people watching, especially if, like me, you eschew mobile phones and get motion sick if you read. Basically, there’s nothing for me to do during my lengthy commute except watch people.

As a result of this activity, I’ve come to the conclusion that if you want to study cultural norms—especially those relating to privacy and politeness—there’s no better place to do so than a train. For instance, a ‘crowded’ London tube carriage looks nothing like its Seoul counterpart, where easily double the number of passengers are crammed in during rush hour.

Given that this book focuses on the quirks of everyday Western life, it’s largely confined to topics that are derisively known as ‘first-world problems’. The term began life as a meme and some of the images, posts and songs employing the phrase are genuinely funny—like the Weird Al Yankovic tune of the same name, where he talks about his sonic toothbrush running out of charge and being forced to brush his teeth like a Neanderthal. But as the writer Steven Poole observes, framing complaints as ‘first-world problems’ is also condescending and patronizing,

‘implying that hunger, disease and war are not only prevalent among the global poor but in some way the sole conditions of their lives. It implicitly characterises the less fortunate majority of the world’s population as saintly idiots who would never dream of complaining about anything more trivial.’

While many of the topics I cover might be specific in form, most deal with problems we all experience as humans with bodies—how we clean them, how we deal with their emissions, how we make claims to public space. I guarantee that wherever you are in the world, the noises and emissions emanating from bodies, and the appropriate space between them, matter. Their forms might be culturally specific, but the concerns themselves are universal, whether you live in a big city or a refugee camp.

I would also like to briefly elaborate on what this book is not about. When an excerpt from Silent but Deadly about why Brits generally keep their washing machine in the kitchen was published in the online anthropology magazine SAPIENS, I received an email chastising me for not discussing climate change and energy consumption. ‘These omissions do make the article seem like the perspective of someone who doesn’t need to worry about paying the bills and doesn’t care about the environment’ opined the letter writer. Although these issues, in my view, have nothing to do with why Brits keep their washing machines in their kitchen, I was being criticized not for what was in the article, but what wasn’t. I’d had an opportunity to turn the conversation to something important—like economic struggles and environmental decline—and I’d blown it!

I can think of little better illustration of how much anthropological norms have shifted since Kluckhohn’s time. If anthropologists in the 1950s were seen to be producers of ‘exotic and amusing facts which have nothing to do with the problems of here and now’, contemporary anthropologists now squarely aim, as SAPIENS observes, to ‘address the inequalities, injustices, and harms humans perpetrate against one another and our planet.’ While this is certainly a laudable goal, it’s my firm belief that anthropology can be concerned with both amusing facts—the leftovers—and the problems of the here and now. Thus, in this book I’m not interested in weighty matters of human existence like war and conflict—except of the petty, everyday kind that leads to death glares rather than actual, you know, deaths. If anything, it’s intended as a light respite from these larger social issues.

In sum, this book is not about the big questions of our age. Instead, it’s focused on the little ones. Why do some people hate bubble baths? What’s the point of decorative pillows? Why do dog owners let their dogs lick their face? And why on earth do the French insist that men wear short, tight swimming costumes in public pools? I remain firmly convinced that if you want to understand human beings, then the little questions, in their own way, are just as illuminating as the big ones, and that through seemingly little questions, larger ones are revealed.

The nineteenth-century French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire (the rather morose-looking chap on the front cover8 ) once said, ‘Let us beware of common folk, common sense, sentiment, inspiration, and the obvious.’ I’ve got nothing against common folk, being one myself, but agree with the idea that common sense, sentiment and the obvious can lead us astray. I suppose if a book about leftovers has an overarching theme, it’s that most of the reasons why we do the things we do are much less obvious than we assume.

In Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Alice ventures through the mantel mirror and discovers a peculiar, new world. By holding up a mirror to our daily lives, I hope to do something similar, showing that we—all of us—are much more peculiar and interesting than we think.

This is a follow-up to my two previous Bell on Bell pieces, and is inspired by Richard Ayoade’s book Ayoade on Ayoade.

Despite our tempestuous and occasionally violent relationship, Bell1 has agreed to a third interview. Given the way our last interview ended, this surprises me until I realise that her goal is clearly to promote her forthcoming book. The interview takes place in her bathroom and I can’t help but notice that she seems to be Single White Femaling me—she’s doing her hair in the same way and is dressed in an eerily similar fashion. It’s like staring into a metaphoric mirror as well as a literal one. Will her insatiable appetite for self-promotion shine through? Will she bring up Terry Pratchett again? Find out in our latest hard-hitting interview.

BELL: In a sentence, describe your forthcoming book.

BELL: [rolls eyes] Not this again. Don’t you tire of being so predictably reductive?

BELL: Just answer the question, please.

BELL: [crossly] Fine. It’s a masterpiece the likes of which the world has never seen.

BELL: But isn’t the book based on your Substack posts?

BELL: I don’t see your point.

BELL: Well, it’s just that the world literally has seen them before.

BELL: I still don’t see your point. After all, nothing’s genuinely new, is it? Anyone who thinks otherwise is hopelessly naïve—bordering on imbecilic, really. Everything is iterations of the same source material presented with different meanings and perspectives—like Christianity and Monopoly, and Radiohead’s ‘Creep’.

BELL: Wait, are you just quoting lines from Heretic at me?

BELL: [contemptuously] It’s called iterating. You know, like Gillian Tett’s iteration of my iteration of why Brits tend to keep their washing machine in the kitchen—except that in this case I’m iterating myself.

BELL: Iterations aside, do you think it’s wise to publish a book that you expect people to pay for, based on something they can get for free?2

BELL: Well, it worked for Evian and FIJI. Plus, the pieces have been expanded and reworked, so it’s more like Sanpellegrino than plain old tap water.

BELL: Are you comparing your book to Sanpellegrino?

BELL: Okay, maybe not Sanpellegrino, but SodaStream water, at the very least. As the saying goes, ‘Buy the cow so you can get the milk for free.’

BELL: That’s literally the opposite of how the saying goes.

BELL: Yes, but that’s only because the saying is stupid. If you’re not buying the cow, you’re stealing the milk, and as a Marxian, I’m against any form of bovine discrimination.

BELL: As far as I know, Marx didn’t have any views on cows.

BELL: [rolls eyes] Like you’d know.3 Marx was actually a big fan of cows. As he once said, ‘I could dance with you until the cows come home. On second thought, I’d rather dance with the cows when you come home.’ Like me, Marx preferred literal cows to metaphoric ones.

BELL: Did you just call me a cow?

BELL: Well, if the shoe fits—

A brief scuffle ensues involving some childish hair pulling (Bell) and more dignified jostling (me) before we remember that both of us are still recovering from calf surgery.

BELL: Your first book wasn’t exactly a raging success. Why did you decide to write a second one?

BELL: The fact is that the public have a strong interest in me and my life—like whether I’m still married,4 whether I have any tattoos, whether I bathe my girls5 and whether I have veneers. I mean, don’t we all? For instance, I’m currently trying to maintain a veneer of politeness in this interview, although it’s quite frankly a struggle.

BELL: We’ve been through this before. They’re not talking about you, they’re talking about the actress Kristen Bell.

BELL: Then how do you explain the concern about how hot I am? These days, the public are much more attuned to the plight of the perimenopausal woman. Besides, it’s my duty to amplify the voices of the people whose observations have inspired my new book—like Marie Nauppaus and Judith Roback and Scott Wlaschin and Peter Spear and Brett Davis and Marcelo Pisarro and Lia Betti and—

BELL: [interrupts] Are you just naming people to obligate them to buy the book?

BELL: What?!? Of course not.

BELL: So your readers have requested the book?

BELL: Not exactly. This is more in the way of an anticipatory collection to address future demand. Think of it like Sir Terry Pratchett’s posthumous A Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories, except they’ve been pre-emptively found.

BELL: We both know that those stories deserved to stay lost.

I can see that although Bell wants to be outraged by this statement, she knows it’s true.

BELL: No comment.

BELL: At the end of the first book, you promised that if you ever wrote a follow-up, you would discuss why we conflate food and sex and what makes a joke funny. However, I know for a fact that you’ve not discussed either topic in your new book. Can you explain why?

BELL: No.

BELL: No, you can’t explain why or no, you won’t?

BELL: [looking out the window] Wait, is that Richard Ayoade?

As I turn to look for Bell’s celebrity crush, she legs it down the stairs and out the front door. I can’t believe I’ve fallen for the oldest trick in the book—well, obviously not Bell’s book, which appears to be nothing more than a compilation of expanded Substack posts. Why did she bother writing a book at all? As I contemplate this mystery, it occurs to me that perhaps the answer lies with Marx. As the great man once said, ‘Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.’

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Last week, one news story reverberated around the world. I’m not talking about the latest events in Ukraine or the Middle East, but the Australian athlete Joanna Wietrzyk, who ‘soiled’ herself at an extreme sporting event in Beijing. Wietrzyk was competing in Hyrox, an indoor fitness challenge that involves an 8km run with intermissions every kilometre for a gruelling array of burpees, sled pulls, wall balls, lunges while carrying sandbags, etc.

Midway through the race, Wietrzyk suffered a bout of diarrhoeal incontinence. Rather than quitting, she finished—and won—with faeces streaming down her legs. Later, from a hospital bed, she posted a now-deleted tweet that included the words, ‘Go hard or go home… a win is a win.’

Other contestants in the race were not, to put it mildly, happy with the decision to allow Wietrzyk to continue in the competition after she shat herself. Allegedly, she left faeces smeared on communal equipment and across the track, causing several athletes to slip and fall.

According to the New York Post, the internet was heavily divided on the case. A minority were of the view that Wietrzyk’s drive should be applauded. To quote one, ‘Respect to Joanna Wietrzyk for not letting some incontinence slow her down. The Aussies are just born tougher…1 She achieved what she came for and won. Shit happens and nothing to look down on if it wasn’t intentional. We all are humans after all.’

But for most commentators, it was a disgusting and outrageous violation of health and safety requirements. To quote a representative view, ‘Losing control of your bowels can happen. Continuing the race while liquid feces run down your legs is another thing entirely. That’s not grit. That’s a hygiene and safety failure’. In the face of all the media attention, Hyrox apologised and indicated that they had put ‘new rules and procedures in place to prevent situations like this from happening again.’

This is far from the first time an athlete has crapped themself mid-race, given that the gastrointestinal effects of intensive exercise, especially running, are well known.2 To quote the legendary American marathon runner Bill Rodgers, ‘More marathons are won or lost in the porta-toilets than at the dinner table.’3 For instance, earlier this year, the South African runner George Kusche won the Comrades marathon from Durban to Pietermaritzburg despite his own bout of anal incontinence, which he joked about during follow-up interviews.

The contrasting responses to Kusche and Wietrzyk’s faecal mishaps are striking, although probably about more than their gender. For instance, in 2024, the American athlete, Taylor Nibb, winner of the Dubai T100 triathlon, was recorded telling a camera operator, ‘I just shit myself… so can you not get my ass.’ In her case, the public seemed to be largely on side. According to one, ‘Mad respect, she kept going regardless of a natural body reaction to vigorous exercise and made the win, GOOD ON HER.’

Part of the more negative reaction to Wietrzyk seems to be due to the fact that the event took place indoors—this wasn’t a case of crapping in the wild or on a road.4 Indeed, much has been made of the fact that the carpet had to be replaced before competition could resume. Likewise, that she ‘contaminated’ communal equipment is also clearly part of the disgust the incident engendered.

Still, I suspect that a significant factor was Wietrzyk’s relatively blasé attitude towards the defecation itself, especially her lack of evident shame and embarrassment at the time. If someone is going to crap themselves in public, the logic seems to go, especially if they’re a woman, then they should at least have the decency to be embarrassed about it—after all, Nibb asked the cameras not to film her backside. Notably, due to the public backlash, Wietrzyk has since apologised, and forfeited her win in the race. ‘I take responsibility for my decision to continue and am deeply sorry for the discomfort and disruption it caused’, she wrote.

But is the outcry justified by the hygienic risks Wietrzyk’s actions posed? After all, communal equipment is frequently contaminated by bodily excretions, including sweat, blood and, on occasion, urine—especially when weight lifting is involved. Anthropologically speaking, although terms like ‘hygiene’ and ‘biohazard’ have been thrown around with abandon, it’s clear that the response to the incident is about more than the physically polluting nature of faeces. This is evident in the fact that media outlets uniformly chose to pixelate Wietrzyk’s lower half5 lest (horrors!) readers be subject to the trauma of a sight that they see in the toilet every day.6

It’s true that faeces are more contaminating than other bodily substances, and that part of our revulsion towards them is probably instinctive and evolutionarily driven. As the anthropologist Sjaak van der Geest observes, faeces seem to have a natural dirtiness connected with their colour, texture, smell and moisture. Notably, sheep, horses and cattle generally avoid grazing near them and there’s some evidence that our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, experience active disgust towards faeces.

But this is not to say that our response is purely instinctive. As the sociologist David Inglis observes, although faeces are the most reviled of all bodily substances, cultural responses vary from a relative lack of concern to ‘very high levels of collective consternation and revulsion if certain individuals break highly regulated and defined norms as to the places and times of legitimate defecation’ (a line that could have been written in response to Wietrzyk herself).

Van der Geest has expanded upon this observation, noting that attitudes towards faeces are socio-culturally and situationally relative. As he asks,

‘Are faeces ever not out place? Can they be clean and orderly? Is shit not always dirty, by itself, by its nature, wherever it is: in a lavatory, in the sewer, in a nappy, in the street, on a sandwich? The examples indicate that there are degrees of dirtiness. Faeces in the pipes of the sewerage system are just dirty, but on a sandwich that I am supposed to eat they become unspeakably disgusting.’

Van der Geest argues that the dirtiness of faeces is contingent on where and whose it is. For instance, we respond differently to baby poo than adult faeces, primarily because babies lack the bodily control to take responsibility for their excretions. Indeed, parents often experience little aversion in dealing with their infants’ faeces.7 According to van der Geest, this attitude changes as the child grows and becomes more independent, learning to go to the toilet by itself. In effect, as it becomes more socially differentiated, its faeces become ‘dirtier’.

The same distinction applies to faecal matter produced by animals versus humans. Van der Geest has surveyed a large number of people on how they would react if a turd was deposited on their doorstep, and whether it would make a difference if the faeces had been left by an animal or a human. All respondents were in agreement that they would be far more disgusted if the culprit was a person. This is because we can’t blame animals for defecating in the street, but any human who committed such an act would be, by definition, either insane or intent on White Lotus-style vengeance. In effect, the source of the faeces changes both its meaning and our response to it.8

The White Lotus is one of the few instances in mainstream television where the act of excreting poo itself has been depicted, although it’s noteworthy that the uncut footage is impossible to find on YouTube.9 What this highlights is the extraordinary power of excretion—evident in our response not just to the act itself but representations of it. As van der Geest observes, ‘Contamination does not only work physically, it also takes place in metaphoric and metonymic ways.’ According to a Ghanaian proverb: ‘Shit stinks and if you talk about it, the smell clings to you.’

This points to the fact that poor Joanna Wietrzyk was the victim not only of a misplaced bowel movement but the symbolically defiling nature of the act, which extended its pollution well beyond the possibility of physical contamination itself. Given these circumstance, her decision to continue with the race might be questionable, but it also speaks to the tenacity of the human spirit in the face of bodies that constantly fail us.

This too is part of the meaning of faeces, although one that’s rarely celebrated. The poet Maxine Kumin said it best, ‘However much we stain the world, spatter / it with our leavings, make stenches, defile / the great formal oceans with what leaks down, / trundling off today’s last barrow-full, / I honor shit for saying: We go on.’

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There’s a scene in the 2001 film Training Day that’s permanently seared on my memory. In it, Jake Hoyt, a rookie cop played by Ethan Hawke, has been set up by Denzel Washington’s corrupt narcotics officer and left at the quarters of a local Los Angeles gang, who’ve been paid to kill him. What starts as a game of poker ends with Hoyt in a bathtub, about to be executed by Smiley (Cliff Curtis), the head of the gang. All hope seems lost when they suddenly discover that Hoyt is carrying the wallet of Smiley’s young cousin, whom he saved from an attempted rape earlier in the day.

On the face of it, the coincidence is highly improbable—something acknowledged by the characters themselves. ‘This is some trippy-arse shit, homes’ one of the gang members says to Smiley after his cousin confirms Hoyt’s story. When I saw the movie, I responded viscerally to the scene, because I can personally attest to the fact that improbable but high-stakes coincidences do sometimes happen.

About a year before the movie came out, I was finishing my PhD in Townsville when I saw an ad in the local paper for field interviewers for a market research company. I already worked part-time in a video store but the job seemed like a fast and easy way to make some additional cash.1

The market research in question was sponsored by a milk company that was considering a price rise. I was contracted to conduct fifty interviews, and the firm employed a random sampling approach to ensure the interviews were representative. What this boiled down to was that I was given four randomly selected neighbourhoods to target, and I had to randomly approach houses based on an algorithm. As an incentive to participate, everyone was offered a $5 scratchie—the Australian term for an instant-win lottery ticket.

What had seemed like easy money at the outset turned out to be hellish work. The middle of the wet season, I was faced with high heat and humidity, psychotic dogs,2 and homeowners repeatedly shutting doors in my face. In hindsight, it was also extremely poorly paid, because in order to get those fifty interviews I had to knock on literally hundreds of doors. I think most people who agreed to be interviewed did so out of pity as I was often invited into their kitchen or lounge for a cold drink, although the free scratchie helped.

On the second day, after I’d been walking the streets in one neighbourhood for a couple of hours, I knocked on the door of a house and a guy about my age opened it, beer in hand. I asked if he wanted to do an interview about milk and he invited me inside. As soon as I entered the lounge room, I knew I’d made a mistake as there were four other guys in the middle of a heavy drinking session, based on all the empty beer cans strewn around. More to the point, they clearly weren’t interested in being interviewed about milk.

I figured I just needed to act normal and finish the interview as quickly as possible, although every mental alarm bell was now ringing. I sat down on the couch next to the guy who’d invited me in and one of his friends asked if I wanted a drink. I assented, mostly to be polite, and he brought back a drink that was clearly alcoholic. I took a tiny sip, put it on the coffee table and launched straight into the interview.

Until that moment, I’d never really considered the sexual connotations of milk, but I got an education that afternoon because every question I asked was accompanied by a lewd running commentary from his mates. I ignored the comments and pushed on, all the while mentally calculating what I would do if one of them made a move. As the back door was open, I figured that if worse came to worst I could leg it out the back.

And then one of the guys got up and casually closed the back door.

At this point, I was about as scared as I’ve ever been in my life, although I was still going through the motions of the interview. Suddenly, the guy I’d been interviewing on the couch, who’d been staring at me intently, said out of the blue, ‘Are you Kirsty Bell?’ Startled, I affirmed that I was—it turned out that we’d briefly gone to primary school together. I hadn’t recognised him, but I knew who he was as soon as he said his name.

In the blink of an eye, the atmosphere changed completely. He told the others to knock off the comments and I completed the interview unscathed. I got out of the house and proceeded to have a delayed stress reaction—I was shaking so hard, I struggled to record the time the interview finished in my log book. Nothing had ultimately happened, and maybe nothing would have, but all I know is that it hadn’t felt safe. Every instinct was screaming at me to get out of there as soon as I entered the lounge room.3

The most striking aspect of the encounter was the sheer size of the coincidence at its heart. After all, the neighbourhood had been selected at random, and so had the house. That I’d gone to primary school for about a year with the guy I was interviewing—and that he recognised me well over a decade later—well, it seemed nothing short of miraculous in the circumstances.

The fact is that we don’t have a good vocabulary for describing these kinds of events. ‘Coincidence’ and ‘chance’ are not merely bloodless terms, but as explanations they aren’t particularly satisfying either. As the behavioural scientist Kevin (Ze) Hong has observed, chance is simultaneously an explanation and a non-explanation. This is because if the goal of explanations is to provide understanding and predict future outcomes, then invoking chance fails on both fronts.

Chance and coincidence are both connected with the the idea of randomness, which has a distinctive place in Western societies. In Hong’s words, coincidence ‘can be seen as a special type of chance, where the random convergence of independent events leads to an unexpected overlap.’

In The Taming of Chance, the philosopher Ian Hacking has shown the radical changes that occurred in Western conceptions of chance over the past two centuries. During this period, chance was transformed from something excluded from prevailing scientific thought to something central to its operation, most explicitly in the form of the randomised controlled trial: the staple of contemporary medical research.

Via the concept of probability, Hacking argues, society became statistical. This, in turn, made chance more palatable as an explanation—quantifying randomness implied a new kind of control. Still, while we accept the concept of probability on an intellectual level, we tend to be spectacularly bad at applying it to ourselves.

A slew of ‘smart thinking’ books—like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan—have highlighted the cognitive biases in our thinking, especially our tendency to read causality into randomness. For instance, we seem particularly prone to attributing our successes to skill and our misfortunes to chance.

According to Hong, while we can be acculturated to the concept of randomness, it’s silent on the question we most want to answer: why did this particular thing happen at this particular moment? This is why we typically find such explanations psychologically unsatisfying and, as Hong observes, why this mode of thought is comparatively rare in the ethnographic record. Instead, far more common are religious or magical explanations in which, to quote James Frazer in The Golden Bough, ‘the elements of caprice, of chance and of accident are banished from the course of nature.’

One of the most famous anthropological illustrations of this phenomenon comes to us courtesy of Edward Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande, based on his fieldwork in the 1920s and 30s in Zandeland, which is now part of South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The textbook example he provided4 of witchcraft beliefs related to people dying as a result of sitting under a granary that collapses.

Evans-Pritchard noted that in Western contexts we would typically explain such deaths by pointing to termites causing the collapse of the granary supports. That people might be sitting under the granary when this happens is merely an unfortunate coincidence. In his words, ‘We have no explanation of why the two chains of causation intersected at a certain time and in a certain place, for there is no interdependence between them.’ For us, this is what Taleb calls a ‘black swan’—a statistically improbable outlier event with widespread social consequences that seems predictable only after the fact.

In contrast, the Zande were perfectly aware that people liked to sit under granaries to escape the heat of the midday sun, and they were also perfectly aware that termite damage could cause granaries to collapse. It was the convergence of these two events in time and space that required explanation. Witchcraft, according to Evans-Pritchard, was the ‘second spear’ explanation that explained the why rather than the how. It didn’t exclude ‘real’ causes but was superimposed upon them.

I personally understand the attractions of the second spear explanation, having recently experienced a freakish accident myself involving, coincidentally (or not!), an actual spear.5 Last Monday, numerous bags of mouldy rubble were removed from the walls of our living room and literally no one—least of all myself—has been able to understand how the following shard of wood came to be embedded in my calf muscle after I tripped on one of the bags.6 According to the damp proofer, there wasn’t even any wood in the rubble, so that I happened to step backwards onto a bag that contained a lone piece sharp enough to not only puncture my calf but embed itself in the muscle strikes me not merely as an unfortunate coincidence but as deeply unlucky.

This is because what roughly translates in English as ‘luck’, according to Hong, is a much more intuitively appealing explanation than chance in explaining why things happen to us. As the anthropologists Giovanni da Col and David Graeber have observed, luck operates as a natural philosophy of fortune. Although it takes a variety of forms cross-culturally and is embedded in very different belief systems, it’s often perceived as a quality that resides in individuals or operates as a mobile force that can be lost or gained. This means it can be controlled to some degree through spiritual or magical intervention.

Most of us, no matter how atheistic our world view or how well we understand the science of probability,7 still draw on concepts like luck in making sense of our lives. And we employ a variety of means—charms, totems, prayers, rituals, lucky numbers and the like—to help us control our fate. Beyond the sense of imperfect agency it gives us, luck is also comforting and ego-protective. According to the philosopher Nicholas Rescher, luck might be a rogue force that constantly interferes with our best efforts and intentions, but it’s also ‘a most useful instrument of self-exculpation.’

This means that you don’t have to be a fan of The Celestine Prophecy8 to see a coincidence as more than just coincidence. Certainly, it’s built into our hardwiring. As the neuropsychologist Paul Broks observes, ‘magical thinking forms the basis of selfhood… It’s a necessary illusion, rooted deep in our evolutionary history. Coincidence, or rather the experience of coincidence, triggers magical thoughts that are equally deep-rooted.’ But as Broks simultaneously acknowledges, there actually is something strange and wonderful (and eerie and terrible) about coincidences—the unpredictable fault-lines upon which the course of our lives so often depend. In the face of these forces, we can do little but concur with the LA gang members: this is indeed some trippy-arse shit.

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I recently read an article about the new Zara death pants. These are loose and airy wide-legged pants available at the high street clothing chain that have caused serious injury to their wearers, because the excess fabric is a tripping hazard. I’m not sure why these particular pants have been singled out, because maxi-dresses are equally lethal.1 Indeed, the Zara death pants are merely the latest in a long line of clothes that have maimed and occasionally killed their wearer over the centuries.

Probably the most notorious example is long, flowing neck scarves.2 The American dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan was murdered in 1929 by her red silk shawl after it got caught in the spokes of the convertible she’d just stepped into. She might be the most famous person to have died in this fashion, but hers is far from an isolated case—death-by-scarf is common enough that it’s called Isadora Duncan syndrome and long scarf syndrome in the medical literature.

In addition to scarves, the book Killer Fashion: Poisonous Petticoats, Strangulating Scarves, and Other Deadly Garments Throughout History, details—in verse3—a variety of other lethal clothing items, from historical relics like corsets, fontages and crinolines, to contemporary items like high heels.

Confirming my longstanding belief that high heels should be avoided like the literal plague, they have been responsible for numerous deaths, including that of the British socialite Jennie Jerome Churchill. As Killer Fashion puts it, ‘Old Winston Churchill had a mum who thought that flats were very dumb. Tripped on her heels, fell down the stairs, now no one looks at what she wears.’ Indeed, internet footage abounds of accidents in high heels, some of which look literally back-breaking.

Of course, flip flops are not much better.4 Podiatrists warn of ‘stress fractures, tendonitis, arch pain, and heel pain.’ And if you step behind the wheel of a car in a pair, your chances of an accident increase exponentially, because of their tendency to get caught on pedals and wedged beneath them.

Lest you think it’s primarily women who are attracted to dangerous clothing, let me assure you that men are similarly afflicted. For example, the pointed and starched shirt collars favoured by nineteenth-century dandies were frequently so high that they couldn’t turn their head, and falling asleep in one was potentially fatal—an 1888 issue of the New York Times reports at least one man asphyxiating on his own collar.

Men’s flirtation with clothing seemingly designed with strangulation in mind did not stop at shirt collars.5 Witness the modern necktie, which was born in the 1920s. Beyond the obvious dangers of wearing what amounts to a mini-noose around one’s neck, neckties have been associated with reduced intraocular pressure and cerebral blood flow. Neckties, it appears, worsen your eyesight and make you dumb.

The situation is just as dire below the belt as above the neck. Most of us have seen boys and men in pants so large, low and baggy that they are constantly in danger of tripping or losing their britches—or both. Of course, tight pants entail their own problems. The much touted reduction in sperm count in men can probably be at least partly blamed on tight pants.

It wasn’t always this way. Archaeological theories suggest that the use of clothing evolved to support human evolution rather than hinder it. For example, the archaeologist Ian Gilligan highlights the requirement for portable thermal protection as humans moved beyond the tropics into colder climates during the Pleistocene ice ages. He argues that the social and psychological aspects of clothing—i.e., dress as a symbolic adornment or expression of modesty—were probably secondary elaborations of an item that, initially at least, had a critical biological role in supporting survival.

However, the French philosopher and semiotician6 Roland Barthes argued that we can’t understand the evolution of clothing merely in terms of the passage from protection to ornamentation. In his words,

‘The first Roman soldiers to throw a wool cover over their shoulders so as to protect themselves from the rain were performing an act of pure protection. But once material, form and usage have become not so much embellished, but simply regimented by a defined social group, the garment has joined the system’.

According to Barthes, once clothing has entered a social system, bodily coverings are transformed into dress, and play by certain social rules that have nothing to do with their utilitarian or decorative attributes. Indeed, he argued that to assess bodily coverings in this way entirely misses the point.

Still, anyone watching a haute couture fashion show,7 where ridiculous, bizarre and obscene outfits rule the day, will have cause to suspect that such clothing, for the most part, has long ceased to have any functional purpose. Instead, a lack of wearability seems to be its entire point—as the following selection of photos attest. But less explicable is the fact that much of our clothing seems not just lacking in functionality but engineered to actively maim and kill us.

Consider the bright red British military uniforms of the nineteenth century. Designed to boost troop morale, their colour had the entirely predictable effect of making soldiers extremely easy to pick off in battle.8 As the military historian Tony Fremont observes in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Robber Bride, ‘Many have been the crimes committed on helpless enlisted men by the designers of military clothing. How many British soldiers died needlessly because of the redness of their uniforms?... Murder by designer!’

After the heavy troop losses incurred in the Zulu War, the military wised up in the subsequent Boer wars and adopted khaki, which provided better camouflage in the South African landscape. However, camouflage clothing itself wasn’t developed until the twentieth century. Yet even in a pattern explicitly designed to emulate nature, the biologist Laszlo Talas and his colleagues have found evidence of considerable cultural diversity, with countries adopting their own designs, or changing them to suit new political allegiances (e.g., the ‘NATO style’).

So what does this say about humans as a species? Having given the matter some thought, it’s frankly difficult to read this as anything other than the death instinct at work. First outlined in Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, we have, in his words, ‘been led to distinguish two kinds of instincts: those the purpose of which is to guide life towards death, and the others, the sexual instincts, which perpetually strive for, and bring about, the renewal of life.’ He suggested that our life and death instincts are in constant battle.

According to psychoanalysts, these duelling instincts play out in the realm of fashion.9 The psychoanalyst Patricia Gherovici argues that fashion is a way of ‘making our mortal bodies look a little better’ while ‘dressing up the death drive’. As the curator Valerie Steele observes in the same article, ‘far from being superficial, fashion exposes people’s desires and anxieties like a psychosomatic rash’.

I can think of little better illustration of the tension between the life and death instincts than the ‘No capes!’ scene in The Incredibles. In it, Mr Incredible rhapsodises over his ideal ‘hero’ suit, which involves a cool-looking cape, and the fashion designer Edna Mode immediately lists a litany of superheroes who died as a result of mishaps caused by their capes. ‘Do you remember Thunderhead?’ she asks. ‘All was well. Another day saved when his cape snagged on a missile.’

It’s as if the sexual drive and the death drive often conspire, with the former—especially our desire to look good—actively undermining our instinct towards life. As Killer Fashion observes of corsetry, ‘Corsets were considered a must to cinch the waist and flatter the bust. Victorian women held their breath, and, stylishly, were squeezed to death.’

The moral of the story is that maybe we should pay the same attention to making our clothes death proof that we pay to making our homes child proof. Perhaps it’s time to reconsider the Zara death pants, the low-crotched baggy jeans, and the wisdom of tying strips of dangling fabric around our carotid arteries. Because you might love killer new fashion, but it shouldn’t actually kill you.

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I recently saw an article titled ‘Jon Snow: A Last Big Story review—the finest swan song you could hope for’. Excited, I was nevertheless a little surprised that this was the first I was hearing about it, as this is the sort of news that tends to break the internet. ‘Finally, the King of the North will get a proper ending’, I thought. However, a quick perusal of the article clarified why I hadn’t heard about the show before—it’s actually a documentary about the British investigative journalist Jon Snow, who was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

In 2014, much to the delight of the press, the journalist met the actor, Kit Harington, who played Jon Snow in Game of Thrones. ‘The meeting that has been eagerly anticipated by fans of the news programme and the HBO fantasy series has finally happened’, reported the breathless newspaper coverage. For better or worse,1 this was later elaborated into a full segment on Channel 4.

Complicating matters further for the real Jon, he also shares his name, although not the exact spelling of it, with another illustrious figure, the nineteenth-century physician John Snow. Considered one of the founders of modern epidemiology, Snow is best known for his work in tracing the outbreak of an 1854 cholera epidemic in London to a Broad Street water pump.

I have a particular interest in the topic of sharing one’s name with someone famous. As I have previously discussed and occasionally satirised on this Substack, I too share a name—or, rather, almost share a name2—with a celebrity. My term for this phenomenon is ‘namesis’. While they don’t know you exist, like any proper nemesis, they are the bane of your life, haunting you not just online but every time some wit makes a joke about meeting Veronica Mars, thinking you haven’t heard it hundred times before.3

My misreading of the subject of ‘Jon Snow: The Last Big Story’ got me thinking more about the topic of shared names, which is basically a universal problem. If you look up your name on LinkedIn, the chances are high that you share it with at least ten other people. For example, according to a Forbes article about people on LinkedIn who share names with a celebrity, there’s a Mr Brad Pitt, a Justice Sandra Bullock and a Mr Paul McCartney. And spare a thought for Mr Bill Clinton Gates, who gets it in the neck on two counts. Basically, we’ve all got name doppelgängers. The primary exception is people whose parents have gone out of their way to give them a barmy name—like Jermajesty Jackson, son of Jermaine and nephew of Michael.

However, imagine you are one of the thousands of people who share your name with Michael Jackson himself. The anthropologist Michael Jackson has reflected at length on this experience. A white Kiwi octogenarian, he was never going to be mistaken in person for the King of Pop,4 but when you share a name with someone famous, it inevitably encroaches upon your life. Jackson notes that he has encountered numerous Michael Jacksons in his lifetime, including several whose debts he was, albeit briefly, saddled with. However, no one teased him about his name until the 1970s, when he started becoming the recipient of jokes about not being black and questions about whether he sang and danced.

For my own part, I didn’t have a clue who Kristen Bell was until people started calling me Veronica Mars circa 2005 or so. Likewise, I wasn’t aware of her recent ‘semi-cancellation’5 until someone made a joke to me about it. In essence, whether you’re paying attention or not, events happening in the life of your namesis have ripple effects on your own.

For example, a 2020 Vice article on the ups and downs of sharing a celebrity name discusses the experiences of one Matthew Kelly, who shares his name with the British TV presenter who was arrested in 2003 on kiddie fiddling charges. Kelly notes that if the presenter had been found guilty (TV Kelly was later cleared), he would have had to change his name. Conversely, in a 2017 Vice article on the same topic, Kate Middleton (22, of London) discusses the fact then when her name twin got engaged to Prince William, she suddenly received over 3,000 friend requests on Facebook.6

Middleton notes that the name has mostly worked in her favour, being ‘a great ice-breaker and great for networking in my job.’ Likewise, the publishing industry expert and commentator Jane Friedman has referenced how she has benefited from sharing the name of the former CEO of the publishing giant HarperCollins, who is considerably older.

Clearly, such benefits are sometimes due to an outright case of mistaken identity. For instance, in the aforementioned 2017 Vice article, one Jennifer Lawrence (36, of Massachusetts) talks about an airport official saying ‘I can’t wait to go home and tell my friends I just met Jennifer Lawrence.’ But the thing is that even if he didn’t mistake her for the celebrity, he can still genuinely claim that he has met Jennifer Lawrence. Indeed, the anthropologist Michael Jackson talks of the fact that when his daughter was in high school, she brought some classmates home who wanted to meet him, ‘as if I would afford them some magical connection with the pop star.’

As Jackson reflects, these reactions point to the significance of personal names and the tangible connection they create between otherwise unrelated people. ‘Is this comparable to being a look-alike—to sharing the physical features of another person, a kind of accidental and unrelated twin?’, he asks. Jackson observes that in many societies, sharing a name with someone frequently invites an informal, joking relationship.

I’ve experienced this phenomenon myself. Because my personal website address is www.notkristenbell.com, I occasionally receive messages from other Kirsten Bells who have stumbled across the site while doing a Google search on their name. The other Kirstens always assume an immediate connection based upon the travails of our shared name, as the following selection of messages attests:

‘Hi Kirsten! I have the same namesis. Lol. Just stopping by on my wanderings to see if I even show up in Google results anymore. Lol. Keep up the good fight. I found you on the first page! Lol. Kb.’

I laughed at your website title!… I was getting fitted for ski boots by a young guy. Three girls walked in and heard my name. They smiled and said “like Kristen Bell.” The young guy goes “No, she is too old.” I almost kicked him in the face. I am sure you can relate!’

Still, I sometimes think about the recipient of a third message once received:

‘So I found your website today, and was amazed. My name is Kirsten Bell and I am currently studying anthropology in post secondary!! I don’t know if there is much point to this message beyond pointing out how interesting I found this. ;)’

Did she continue on with anthropology, and does she curse the fact that my online profile outstrips hers? In other words, am I her namesis?

There’s at least one other academic who shares my name: a kinesiologist at the University of Waterloo who works in the area of health, which is my own academic specialisation. As she is considerably younger than me, I’ve had much longer to build an online academic presence. To differentiate herself from other similar academic names, she frequently lists herself on academic papers as Kirsten E. Bell. Although I am also a Kirsten E. Bell, I get to be plain old ‘Kirsten Bell’ in Google Scholar, simply because I got there first.

Reflecting on sharing a name with the better-known writer, the singer Michael Cunningham observes that,

Names are supposed to point cleanly to one person. That’s the theory, anyway. But when your name overlaps with someone famous, especially someone with decades of cultural head start, the neat one-to-one relationship gets fuzzy—mostly in search results and digital spaces.

According to Michael Jackson, the joking relationships common amongst people who share names, along with the avoidance relationships that exist in some societies, highlight the ambiguity of two people sharing the same name. In his words, ‘The common name suggests a common identity, while the manifest differences between the individuals who share the name confounds this assumption.’ In essence, a shared name invites both connection and comparison: how are you like that person and how are you different?

This comes across in the actor Michael B. Jordan’s recent reflections on the impact of sharing his name with arguably the world’s most famous athlete. He talks about the weight of sharing Jordan’s name, which created a ‘healthy chip’ by pushing him to carve out an identity in his own right. Elsewhere, it’s alleged that the actor doesn’t want to meet the athlete ‘unless he can confidently say he has matched—or at least comes close to matching—the legendary status attached to their shared name.’7

Ultimately, nameses point to the profound relationship between names and identity. As Jackson observes, the significance with which we imbue them illustrates the universal human capacity to fuse words with the things they represent. In many respects, this is our greatest superpower. In Jackson’s words, ‘The act of naming… enabl[es] us to create entities out of nothing.’ But when it comes to human names, only so many variations are possible. Inevitably, we will stumble upon someone else with the same name—particularly in the digital era, which has enlarged social networks from our local communities to the world at large.8

Everyone has a namesis—someone whose existence forces you to question what’s so distinctive about you. Still, having recently learned that Kristen Bell hated her given name as a child, and was known universally by Annie9 (her middle name is Anne) until the age of 16, I can’t help but wish she’d stuck with it in her professional life. But then again, it could be worse. I could be named Taylor Swift.

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Recently, I was travelling on the tube in London when a rather dishevelled woman entered the carriage who seemed, not to put too fine a point on it, a few crayons short of a packet. She sat down directly opposite me and immediately began staring at me in a distinctly aggressive way. Although I could feel her eyes boring into me, I studiously avoided eye contact, which seemed the safest course of action.1 To my relief, she eventually turned her attention to someone else. Unfortunately, the new unwilling recipient of her intense, unblinking gaze was the 12-year-old boy sitting next to her.

A little concerned at this point, I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed her odd behaviour. Briefly catching the eye of the guy sitting on the other side of the boy, we shared a concerned glance. Suddenly, the boy, who had clearly had enough of the unsolicited attention, burst out ‘Stop staring at me, paedo!’ The woman lifted her hand like she was going to hit him and the guy sitting next to the boy leaned over to intervene. She then swore at the kid—and, I assume, the carriage at large—and leapt up as the doors opened. I breathed a sigh of relief when she exited the train.

This incident got me thinking more about the social significance of eye contact—a topic I’ve previously discussed in relation to civil inattention. Coined by the sociologist Erving Goffman, the term describes the process whereby one person gives another basic visual acknowledgement and then conspicuously withdraws their attention. Its opposite is uncivil attention—i.e., staring aggressively or inappropriately, like the woman on the tube. But both these types of eye contact are different from mutual glances, like the one I shared with the man sitting next to the boy.

What makes mutual glances fascinating is how complex the meanings they communicate are. We often talk of ‘telling glances’, but all glances speak—often more powerfully than words themselves.2 Consider the above scene in the film Stardust. Three brothers—all princes and rivals for the throne—are sharing a toast with the bishop when he keels over, having been poisoned by the wine. An entire conversation is held in the siblings’ subsequent glances: ‘Have you been poisoned?’, ‘Have I been poisoned?’, ‘Did you poison the wine?’, ‘Phew, I think I’m okay’ and ‘Whoops, I spoke too soon’.

Despite the evident power of glances, elocution lessons, speech therapy for those of us with lisps and speech impediments,3 and a general parental concern with correcting our accent and grammar all serve to cultivate the impression that speech is far more important than the nonverbal aspects of communication. After all, we’re not drilled in body language and eye contact—unless you count Tyra Banks’ tutelage on America’s Next Top Model on how to ‘smize’4 (‘smile with your eyes’). Still, a variety of psychological experiments have shown just how important these elements of communication are.

One of the earliest and most influential studies by Albert Mehrabian and Susan Ferris aimed to isolate the role of facial and vocal components on how we infer attitudes when subjects uttered a single word (‘maybe’). They found that while both components mattered, facial components mattered far more. Mehrabian later elaborated on these ideas in his book Silent Messages, the core premise of which is that these eponymous messages are far more important than overt ones in dictating how we interpret information.5

Mehrabian doesn’t have much to say specifically about eye contact in the book, except to note its connection with intimacy. However, various social psychologists, most notably Michael Argyle, have explored its special significance in human communication. This research shows that the meaning of eye contact is far from straightforward. For example, although it’s associated with intimacy, people tend to make more eye contact when less personal topics are discussed. Also, as I previously outlined in relation to civil inattention, there’s a delicate balance between too little eye contact and too much—and cross-cultural norms differ significantly around this.

Argyle’s work points to an equilibrium theory of gaze, which highlights the role that physical proximity plays in relation to eye contact—and the way they moderate each other to maintain a degree of bodily equilibrium. Eye contact reduces when physical proximity is greater than we desire, and vice versa. As he observes, ‘When proximity is very great, as in lifts and buses, interaction and eye contact often cease entirely’.

Arguably, one of the reasons why eye contact and body language tend to be underemphasised in comparison to language itself is that they are a form of communication that connects us with other animals. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it in his 1860 essay ‘Behavior’, ‘The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world over.’

Of course, this isn’t entirely true. For example, the eye roll might be the calling card of the 13-year-old girl, but its contemporary meaning is relatively recent and far from universal.6 Indeed, in Shakespearean England, rolling your eyes was more likely to get you accused of lust than contempt.

But the meaning of certain expressions does come to us courtesy of biology and evolution. As cognitive scientists Christine Johnson and Rosalyn Karin-D’Arcy have observed, in many species, a socially directed stare is often threatening, and gaze aversion or ‘cutoff’ behaviour is the tactic used to preclude engagement and potential violence. My encounter on the tube reveals precisely these dynamics, right down to my instinctive desire to avoid the woman’s gaze.

But eye contact is often a precursor to positive social interactions as well. For example, rhesus monkeys attempting to solicit sex often wait until the target of their amorous intentions looks at them before engaging in lip smacking displays. Likewise, the eyes are key to human attraction. Peruse any personals section and you’ll find countless souls convinced7 they’ve made a connection with a random stranger based on a fleeting mutual glance. ‘We briefly made eye contact… I think you’re stunning and would love to connect’, says one recent poster to the Craigslist Vancouver Missed Connections column. ‘You sat in the row in front of mine from Tokyo to Vancouver. Caught your eye in customs a few times’, writes another.

Interestingly, Johnson and Karin-D’Arcy report evidence that higher-order primates like baboons and chimpanzees are aware of the social significance of the gaze, because when they detect a mutual gaze between their rivals, they sometimes interfere to prevent a possible coalition between them. This suggests cognisance of the significance of gazes as an instrument of social connection.

This feature of eye contact has long been highlighted in sociological assessments of it. To quote the German sociologist George Simmel,

‘The union and interaction of individuals is based upon mutual glances. This is perhaps the most direct and purest reciprocity that exists anywhere… This mutual glance between persons, in distinction from the simple sight or observation of the other, signifies a wholly new and unique union between them.’

For Simmel, society was founded upon the mutual glance. Thus, even though the eye can have a sanctioning role, such as the censorious stares provoked when someone deviates from social norms, this is typically accompanied by mutual glances between bystanders. In fact, part of how we confirm a transgression has occurred is by making eye contact with others—like the man I shared the glance with on the train. As the sociologist Carol Warren notes of such cases, the subsequent eye contact amongst bystanders is a form of collusion that expresses unity against the social breach.

Still, the sociologist Harvey Sacks suggests that mutual glances are about far more than merely reinforcement or affirmation of social norms, which is how we typically tend to think of them. But this requires us to assume that the other person knows what it is we saw, that they saw the same thing we did, and that they have made the same assessment. That this happens, Sacks observes, ‘would seem to involve a fantastic kind of social integration’. Indeed, he goes so far as to suggest that the mutual glance virtually represents a form of mind reading. This is because in such moments, we intuitively know what complete strangers are thinking.

Ultimately, the mutual glance—that moment of communion shared with a complete stranger—is something, as Sacks intuited, that we don’t fully understand and can’t really explain. While we can’t actually read minds, we can read eyes, which sometimes amounts to the same thing. Ralph Waldo Emerson says it best:

‘Eyes are bold as lions, — roving, running, leaping, here and there, far and near. They speak all languages. They wait for no introduction… What inundation of life and thought is discharged from one soul into another, through them! The glance is natural magic. The mysterious communication established across a house between two entire strangers, moves all the springs of wonder.’

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Last week, I received an email through the university server titled ‘IMPORTANT NOTICE!!!’ and advertising a number of free items from the estate of the late partner of one Mrs Caitlyn Gaviria. The email promised that the items were ‘ABSOLUTELY FREE’, although coverage of shipping costs from the US would be required.

Mrs Gaviria’s former partner clearly being a Renaissance man, these possessions included a startlingly disparate array of items: a playstation, several X-boxes, an iPad, a Macbook pro, an antique Steinway piano, a Meta Quest Oculus (I had to look that one up), a mint-condition violin, a ‘63 Firebird V guitar and, most significantly, Eric Clapton’s 1939 Martin OOO-42 guitar.

Now, I’m embarrassed to admit this publicly, but I immediately forwarded the email on to a former colleague who is in a rock band, builds guitars and has a huge collection of them. In my defence, I realised the email looked sketchy. First, barring the excessive punctuation, it’s generally safe to assume that any email titled ‘IMPORTANT NOTICE’ can be ignored.1 It also raised a host of questions. Why was Mrs Caitlyn Gaviria giving away her partner’s prized possessions to random strangers at Imperial College? How on earth did Mr Caitlyn Gaviria get Eric Clapton’s guitar in the first place? (And when did Eric Clapton get into Martins? I thought he was a Gibson and Fender man.2)

But the thing is that the email came from the account of a senior Imperial academic. ‘Ah, she must know this Mrs Caitlyn Gaviria’ I thought to myself, after diligently checking its source. In essence, the legitimacy of the apparent author of the email overrode all common sense about the unlikeliness of the scenario being presented.3 I realised it was a scam about twenty minutes later, when the same email was sent from the account of a second Imperial academic.

I‘ve since discovered that the University of Cambridge was targeted in April with the same scam, although this time the email came from a Mrs Talida State, who ‘is currently downsizing and has kindly offered her late husband’s beloved possessions… to members of our community’. The spammers were able to access university accounts because of a phishing email sent around about payslips—the systems of anyone who clicked on the email were compromised (a colleague of mine was one of many affected). IT picked up the problem quickly, because the emails soon disappeared off the server, but the incident got me thinking more about the nature of spam.

What we now call ‘spam’ is not itself a new phenomenon. Anyone born prior to the 1980s will probably remember the chain letters that used to occasionally turn up in the mail. I remember receiving one when I was 12 from someone I’d met while staying with friends in Mount Isa—a town about 1,000kms from where I lived. I guess she thought she was doing me a favour because the chain letter promised that sending copies of the letter to ten people would bring me luck. The problem was that the letter also warned that breaking the chain would bring down unspecified calamities upon my head.

I was disconcerted by the letter, and resentful of the burden my new ‘friend’ had placed upon me to pass it on. Unsure of what to do, I showed it to my mum, who promptly threw it out. I recall being simultaneously relieved and alarmed by this, in case the promised calamities were visited upon me (they weren’t). My new Mount Isa friend sent me further letters after that, but I was so turned off by the chain letter that I never responded.

As Smithsonian Magazine documents, chain letters are centuries old. Some of the earliest remaining examples are so-called letters from Heaven, whose purported source was Jesus himself. The writer Amelia Soth reports that the widely circulated ‘Sunday Letter’ threatened terrible punishments for those disobeying the commandant to honour the Sabbath. For instance, anyone riding a horse on Sunday ‘would find that horse transformed to fire between their legs in Hell’. Conversely, blessings were promised to those who copied and spread the message.

But while unsolicited and annoying communications from within our social networks may be centuries old, there’s little question that the digital era—and especially the rise of networked computers—transformed them completely. The media studies scholar Marjorie Kirby argues that email not only made it exponentially faster and easier to transmit information within networks, it resulted in ‘reduced “ownership” of what is communicated’. The consequence was a veritable avalanche of electronic spam.

Despite its ubiquity in our daily lives, spam has been the focus of surprisingly little scholarly attention,4 although a key exception can be found in Finn Brunton’s Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet. According to Brunton, the term ‘spam’ arose early in the initial era of networked computing (1970s-1995) to describe actions in which users would post meaningless text onto messaging boards, in order to push other text off the screen and take control of the conversation. Likewise, it was the term used for people who flooded chat rooms with text. It quickly became a noun (‘it’s spam’), a verb (‘they spammed me!’) and an adjective (‘spammy’).

Brunton reports that there are numerous folk etymologies for how spam got its name. One is that spam is an acronym for ‘shit posing as mail’. Another is that it’s an acronym for the Esperanto5 phrase ‘SenPete Alsendita Mes â go’, which means ‘a message sent without request’. However, the general consensus is that the term comes from a 1970 Monty Python’s Flying Circus skit featuring a café where spam is the primary item on the menu, and a group of Vikings who repeatedly break into song about its wonders.

To quote Brunton,

‘Because it’s a joke whose humor relies on repetition, and because geeks love Monty Python,6 it became a rather tedious running gag in the early culture of networked computers. By the transitive property of being annoying, “spam” then became a word for other kinds of tedious, repetitious, irritating behavior, whether produced by a person or a malfunctioning program’.

During this initial phase, spam referred to any undesirable text, whether it was ‘repetitive, excessive, or interfering’. Indeed, an early academic article by the folklorist Lee-Ellen Marvin on the aesthetics of text-based realities simply described spam as an ‘excess of communication’. An example Brunton recounts is of the LambdaMOO user ‘Minnie’, who frequently posted incoherent and inflammatory screeds on the site. A petition soon began to forcibly remove her from the game due to her ‘long history of vindictiveness, paranoia, slander, harassment, lying, and cheating; but especially her compulsive spam’.

This early definition of spam as simply an excess of communication was partially an artefact of the fragility of the infrastructures of early networked computing. Anyone old enough to remember the days of dial-up internet will recall how slow emails were to load, how expensive the internet was to use, and how frequently it cut out.7 As Brunton notes, ‘It cost nothing for someone to post a message at their local machine… but it cost other users something to receive it, in money, in disk space, in opportunity cost, and in attention’.

Brunton argues that spam’s second phase began in 1995. This era coincided with the privatisation of the network and the beginning of spam as a money-making enterprise, along with the attendant rise of ‘phishing’ as specific variant of it—a hacker term that was popularised in 1995. In this period, spam came to take on new meanings. No longer was it simply an excess of communication. It was an excess of communication of a particular type—primarily, mass emails that were commercial in orientation and sometimes deceptive. This was the era of Nigerian princes wanting to offload their millions,8 fake password requests and stock market pump and dump scams.

Although most of these scams required, in Brunton’s words, either ‘enormous gullibility or a great fondness for porn’,9 there was growing concern about the need to regulate spam during this period. However, developing a clear definition proved challenging. As Brunton observes, the problem was partly metaphoric in nature. Were spammers free-riders? Parasites? Daring entrepreneurs? The metaphors mattered because they dictated views on how the problem of spam should be addressed—i.e., whether it was a headache that must be endured in the name of free speech or a pernicious invasion that must be stopped.

According to Brunton, the second era of spam ended with the passage of the CAN-SPAM act in 2003—the first legislation to attempt to regulate the phenomenon. Taking the line that spam was a legitimate commercial activity that nevertheless demanded regulation, CAN-SPAM required that senders’ identity be authentic, that ads be clearly designated as such, and receivers had to be given the opportunity to opt out of correspondence. The act was followed by the rise of spam filters, although they further highlighted the problems with trying to define and identify spam.

Brunton argues that filters and legislation ushered in the third era of spam, by inadvertently strengthening the criminal infrastructure surrounding it. Spam now required far greater resources, because exponentially larger volumes needed to be sent in order to reach its targets. Moreover, once spam was destroyed as a reputable business model, spammers no longer needed to content themselves with sale pitches when the real money to be made was in phishing, identity theft, credit card scams, etc. The result of efforts to regulate spam was that it became, in Brunton’s words, ‘much more criminal, experimental, and massively automated’, and thereby much harder to detect.

I suspect that with the rise of AI and LLMs we’ve now entered the fourth era of spam—a topic Brunton doesn’t discuss, given that his book was published in 2013. However, in closing he mentions a new genre of machine-generated spam books beginning to colonise Amazon. This suggests that the current ‘AI slop tsunami’ might be best understood as merely the latest incarnation of spam, rather than a distinctively new phenomenon. Indeed, AI-slop fits nicely into Brunton’s definition of spam, which he suggests is, in the final analysis, ‘the use of information technology infrastructure to exploit existing aggregations of human attention’.

It’s precisely as a result of this attribute that spam is virtually impossible to eradicate. According to Brunton, getting rid of spam would require us to either hobble our technologies to the point of unusability, or transform them in ways that would fundamentally contradict the values that inform their design.

But spam also thrives on ambiguity. The most effective spam is the stuff we think might actually be ham (i.e., Eric Clapton’s guitar). It’s the messages we’re not sure about but forward on regardless—just in case—thereby enhancing their provenance and credibility. Because the real secret of successful spam is not that we blindly believe it, but that it makes spammers of us all.

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Recently, I travelled up to Oxford via train with a friend. As available seats were limited and I get motion sick if I’m not facing the direction of travel, we ended up sitting opposite each other at a table. This meant that we were in very close proximity to the two random strangers who were sitting at the table with us.

Given that we hadn’t caught up for a while, we did so throughout the hour-long train trip. Naturally, the two strangers sitting at our table, who were also unknown to each other, did what strangers normally do when confronted with the private conversation of others: they ignored us, or, at least, politely pretended to. Still, their proximity made the illusion of privacy virtually impossible to maintain. They couldn’t not overhear our conversation, even if they wanted to,1 although we all tried very hard to act as if the situation was otherwise.

Erving Goffman, the pre-eminent sociologist of public life, called this phenomenon ‘civil inattention’. In Behavior in Public Places he defined it as follows:

‘What seems to be involved is that one gives to another enough visual notice to demonstrate that one appreciates that the other is present, while at the next moment withdrawing one’s attention from him so as to express that he does not constitute a target of special curiosity or design.’

A perfect illustration of this phenomenon can be found in the 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice where Mrs Bennett is trying to crudely engineer a marriage proposal from Mr Bingley to her daughter Jane. She ushers her younger daughters out the room on patently false pretences and Elizabeth stays behind to maintain propriety. However, she immediately signals to both Jane and Mr Bingley that she’s not listening to their conversation by picking up her embroidery and positioning her body away from them. Her body language is screaming, ‘Go ahead and talk. I’m definitely not listening avidly to every word you say.’

Civil inattention can occur amongst friends and acquaintances. An example Goffman provides is when the person you’re talking to receives a phone call. The polite thing to do is to signal that you’re not listening, even if you are. You do this by shifting your gaze from your friend and focusing intently on something else, like your fingernails or your phone, or gazing blankly into space as if you’re mentally composing an aria. However, the practice is most common amongst strangers. Via civil inattention, we simultaneously let people know we have registered their presence and signal our intention to give them privacy.

As the sociologist Mervyn Horgan observes, ‘Shared commitment to civil inattention through the mutual indifference of strangers makes ordinary everyday urban life amongst strangers possible.’ It’s civil inattention we have to thank for not being drawn into endless conversational entanglements with random strangers whenever we leave our homes. Still, this isn’t straight indifference, but the respectful kind.

Goffman differentiated civil inattention from treating other people as nonpersons (i.e., acting as if they simply don’t exist2), otherwise known as uncivil inattention. Looking straight through someone is an example of such. At the other end of the spectrum is uncivil attention—like a hateful stare, or an overtly sexualised one.3 This points to the significance of eye contact to civil inattention, and the fine balance required between not enough attention (looking through someone) and too much (staring).

Writing about the US context, Goffman observed that civil inattention typically involves the eyes of the looker passing over the eyes of the other person without overt recognition. This pattern typically changes on streets, where the passersby eye each other up to approximately eight feet, and then cast their eyes down as they pass each other. However, this is a behaviour we have to be socialised into—as anyone who has ever been subject to the intense, unblinking gaze of a toddler can attest.4 This is why the rules surrounding the level of eye contact are culturally distinct. We have to learn how to look—and look away.

These cultural differences are illustrated in what is widely satirised as ‘the German stare’. This is basically the extra couple of seconds of eye contact common in Germany when people are practicing civil inattention, which visiting Americans, Australians and Brits often find deeply disconcerting.

The online language school Lingoda has an entire blog post devoted to the topic. Citing Goffman, it states,

‘Looking away is a way to avoid “intruding” on someone. However, Germans often view looking away as shifty, suspicious, or even insincere. To look someone in the eye, even a stranger, is a signal of transparency. By holding a gaze, a German is essentially saying, “I am an honest person with nothing to hide, and I assume the same of you.”’

However, the post goes on to observe that sometimes the German stare is actually a sign you’re doing something wrong—like talking too loudly on your phone in public. Goffman makes this point of civil inattention more broadly, arguing that the right to it is withdrawn when we behave without regard to social propriety. This results in either censorious stares or studious avoidance. In this respect, civil inattention and its opposites act as an instrument of social regulation—as the sociologist Carol Warren discusses.

Still, for the most part, people take civil inattention for granted.5 In fact, we’re so used to acting as if we have a small bubble of privacy around us that we frequently come to assume it’s real. I’m often amazed by what people will reveal in public places based on a completely false assumption of privacy. For instance, I once sat next to a middle-aged guy on the tram who was clearly sexting with someone. I glanced over casually and could see the entire conversation because he used a ridiculously large font on his phone.6

Goffman pointed out that undercover workers often make good use of civil inattention. In his words, ‘the form adhered to is that of non-acquainteds offering each other civil inattention; but underneath is a one-sided, concealed relationship.’ During World War II, the public had to be constantly reminded that civil inattention was sometimes an act—via the British government’s ‘Careless talk costs lives’ campaign, and the Americans’ ‘Loose lips sink ships’ variant.7

Civil inattention is such a core component of contemporary life that we only become consciously aware of its existence when confronted with someone who fails to practice it. Sometimes this is because the rules surrounding social interaction have become genuinely ambiguous. In my experience, this is a particular problem on flights. Because you are stuck next to someone for hours on end, civil inattention can start to seem rude when resolutely practiced, and further social interaction is often required. However, most of us have had the experience of sitting next to someone we soon regret making polite conversation with, because they refuse to shut up for the entire flight.

But even in contexts where the rules are clear, you occasionally meet people who ignore them. My husband and I had this experience in Kraków a few years back while we were having dinner at one of those outdoor restaurants that can be found in market squares all over Europe. Characterised by crap food, sky-high prices and tables jammed closely together, they are populated primarily by tourists because the locals are not dumb enough to frequent them.

We were chatting over a pre-dinner drink when the guy sitting alone at the table next to us interrupted our conversation to proffer his opinion.8 We chatted with him for a few minutes, assuming that he would then go back to quietly eating his meal when our food was served, but he took our polite chitchat as license to invite himself to our dinner. Eventually, we made our excuses and left, tired of a conversational entanglement we’d neither invited nor enjoyed.

The incident stood out because it’s basically the exception that proves the rule. What’s striking is how comparatively rare violations of civil inattention are, despite the intrinsic lack of privacy that contemporary urban life entails. But it shows that while privacy might be an illusion, it requires mutual cooperation to be sustained.

So the next time your eyes fleetingly meet those of a stranger before you both look away, take a moment to appreciate the most subtle yet significant interpersonal ritual of contemporary urban life. Because contrary to all appearances, the real secret of a well functioning society is not a polite smile or a greeting from a stranger, but two random people on a train resolutely ignoring your conversation with your friend.

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This is not the post I had planned for this week. However, I somehow managed to overwrite the Word document I was working on with a blank version, thereby losing an entire day of research and writing. In desperation, I turned to my ‘draft posts’ folder, which is why you’re getting this extremely random and somewhat anomalous post that I began a couple of years ago as a follow-up piece to a couple I’d written about my time as a part-time video store clerk. (All I’m saying is that there’s a reason why it languished in my drafts folder for years.)

Between the ages of 15 and 25, I worked part-time at a video store—a job that I like to think was good training for becoming a professional anthropologist. I’ve previously written about customers, including those who rented porn and those who rented kids’ movies, but in this post I want to focus on video stores themselves.

For most of my years as a clerk, I worked at a locally owned video store. It was not, by any means, a perfect job. For my boss, Single White Female was not merely our most successful video rental of 1993 but a job requirement.1 He didn’t believe in unions and a condition of employment was that we weren’t allowed to join one. This meant that we had a flat hourly rate regardless of whether our shift was on a Wednesday morning, a Saturday night, or Christmas day.

He also purchased films according to his own personal preferences and was appallingly bad at predicting what videos would do well. Army of Darkness, which was already well on its way to becoming a cult classic upon video release, he declared unwatchable, initially refusing to purchase copies until customer demand forced him to relent. Conversely, Showgirls, a movie that was universally panned, he deemed a ‘top little flick’,2 purchasing 20-odd copies, most of which languished on the shelves after the initial flurry of rentals.

During the seven years I worked there, I dealt with occasionally unpleasant customers and a few bizarre events, including a venomous snake that somehow got into the shop,3 videos returned in a bag crawling with maggots, and, most memorably, a stabbing. A ten-year-old Aboriginal girl stabbed another in the back with a steak knife and they turned to me to clean up the blood and resolve the dispute.

Still, aside from the endless free movies I had access to, I always felt valued as an employee. Once my boss realised my love of movies and virtually encyclopaedic knowledge of them, I was the go-to staff member when anyone had a question about actors or films.

There’s a scene in the movie Clerks4 where the protagonists Dante and Randal are comparing annoying customers and Randal, who works at a video store, discusses the customers who expect clerks to be mind readers—like the one who asks ‘Do you have that one with that guy who was in that movie that was out last year?’ The thing is that customers would do this all the time and I would generally know exactly what film they were talking about.5 Basically, video store clerking wasn’t just a job for me as a 15-year-old, it was a calling.

I worked at the local store from 1990 until the beginning of 1998, when I embarked on my doctoral fieldwork in South Korea. By the time I left the store, I was their longest-serving employee and I expected to resume the job when I returned home. However, during my year-long fieldwork stint, the store went bust—an early sign of the video rental industry’s impending demise, although I didn’t know it at the time.

When I got back to Townsville at the end of 1998, I found a role at a national video store chain—let’s call it Video Sleazy.6 Although the chain was a mixture of franchised shops and corporate-owned ones, all the Townsville stores were corporate-owned. This basically meant they were accountable to shareholders and run out of the head office in Sydney.

Notably, my previous years of experience working in a video store were not considered an advantage in my new job. I was bluntly informed in the interview that this typically produced a number of bad habits that would need to be corrected. I suspect that working at McDonald’s would have been viewed more positively, primarily because Video Sleazy’s entire business model seemed to be premised upon copying it. This became clear when they handed me a huge training manual, with the admonishment to complete it (in my own time, of course) before my first shift.

Consisting of a three-ring instructional binder and five different training videos to watch, it covered every single aspect of the job, from the type of pants that were acceptable as part of our uniform (navy and pleated) to how customers should be greeted. A warm ‘Welcome to Video Sleazy’ was required within the first 30 seconds of the customer entering the shop—no exceptions! However, as the manual repeatedly emphasised, I was no longer a clerk but a salesperson.

The videos were full of pseudo-scientific sales techniques we were expected to master. For instance, we were instructed to focus on the customer’s left eye when speaking to build trust and rapport. However, the central focus of the videos was the art of upselling—basically, the ‘Would you like fries with that?’ pitch pioneered by McDonald’s.

Translated into the world of video rentals, this meant that if someone hired a new release, staff were required to ask if they wanted a second one to get the ‘Two for $10’ deal, or if they would like to add a bottle of coke and a packet of chips to get our ‘movie meal’ deal. Oh, and just in case we were tempted to ignore the advice in the instruction manual, we were warned that secret shoppers hired by the head office regularly made trips into local corporate branches to ensure that staff were abiding by the training.

Video Sleazy could not have been more different from the local store I’d previously worked in, with its casual, familial atmosphere. When I started working in the latter as a 15-year-old, my mentor was the assistant store manager Toni. Confident and friendly, she was the kind of person who called everybody ‘matey’ and seemed very worldly and wise to me,7 although I doubt she was more than 20. Toni had a deep and unshakeable love of Tom Cruise and used to spend the quiet periods during our joint shifts gossiping with friends on the phone. I was very fond of her and sad when she left a few years later, after getting pregnant.

Conversely, the main person I remember from Video Sleazy was James. From the corporate office in Sydney and the head manager of the Townsville stores, he seemed to have modelled himself on Alec Baldwin’s abrasive sales trainer Blake from Glengarry Glen Ross—minus the intellect and charisma. We were regularly pulled in for team meetings where we got similar speeches about the need to increase sales and the consequences of failing to produce them.

You see, at Video Sleazy, the frequency of our shifts was determined by our average weekly take. This was basically the average amount spent per customer on our shift that was logged to us. If your average take was lower than the expected minimum, your shifts would be reduced accordingly.

During my first week, someone purchased $100 worth of videos, thus dramatically inflating my average take. Although the purchase had zero to do with my sales skills (which are non-existent), I was briefly labelled a ‘high performer’—a dubious privilege that earned me the choicest shifts, along with the enmity of my colleagues. Still, it didn’t matter much because staff were constantly rotated between the video store branches, presumably based on the premise that friendly co-workers are unproductive workers.

I hated everything about the job, which didn’t even come with the side benefit of free movies.8 The icing on the cake was the investigation launched by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission about a year after I started working for the company. Accused of unfair price rises in the lead-up to the introduction of the national goods and services tax, and facing a fine of up to $10 million, a group of corporate bigwigs flew up from the head office in Sydney and held back-to-back panel interrogations with all the Townsville staff. Although I was about to finish my PhD and had just been offered an academic job in the US, it was still a deeply unsettling experience, because we all knew they were looking for a scapegoat.

In 2001, about a year after I made my escape, Video Sleazy admitted to misleading customers. Two years after that, the company had sold off most of their corporate stores, and a decade later they were basically dead in the water. By 2010, there was barely a video store to be found anywhere in Australia.

In the grand scheme of things, video stores had a remarkably short lifespan. Like the characters in the 70s cult classic Logan’s Run, they were killed off after 30 years—and in both cases, it was the computer wot dun it. If video killed the radio star, streaming killed the video store.

In many respects, the history of the video store is a microcosm of the history of industrialisation and capitalism itself. For instance, I suspect my experience of transitioning from a family-owned video store to a corporate one wasn’t too dissimilar from what it was like for a late eighteenth-century artisan moving into a factory. I also got a front-row seat to what the sociologist George Ritzer has termed the ‘McDonaldization’ of business and society, with its emphasis on efficiency, calculability, predictability and control.

In hindsight, video stores were arguably the first major—or at least most visible—victim of digitalisation. In the blink of an eye, they went from a mainstay in shopping centres and urban neighbourhoods to basically extinct, a process we are now witnessing at scale in high streets across the country. Still, every time I sit in front of my TV screen, scrolling through film after film in a mostly fruitless search for something to watch, I think to myself, for what feels like the thousandth time, ‘God, I miss the video store.’

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When I think of Sedona, the city in the US state of Arizona, I think of three things: spectacular high-desert scenery, New Age mysticism and Papyrus—not the ancient paper, but the font. In my experience, you can’t swing a cat in Sedona without hitting a sign written in Papyrus, and I can’t think of a font that better epitomises the town’s sensibility, where luxury shops intermingle with those offering aura readings and trips to its world-famous spiritual vortexes.

Described by Design for Hackers as the ‘fake-destroyed-column of fonts’, Papyrus was designed in 1983 to look like a hand-calligraphed typeface that might have been written on ancient papyrus itself (its letters appear to have been lightly sanded). This is probably why it’s beloved of manufacturers of New Age products everywhere. Go to one of those generic mystic shops—you know, the type that stock dream catchers, tarot cards, incense and patchouli oil—and I guarantee that Papyrus will be the font of choice on the packaging of at least one of the items stocked.

In addition to being beloved of marketers of New Age products, Papyrus was also the font used in the Avatar films, much to the derision of font nerds everywhere. Indeed, one of Saturday Night Live’s most entertaining skits features Ryan Gosling as a graphic designer who can’t get over the fact that the title font used in the movie was Papyrus, the font of choice of ‘hookah bars, Shakira merch, and off-brand teas.’

As Papyrus proves, fonts have personalities. This is something I was aware of long before I learned the word ‘font’ itself.1 For instance, without being able to articulate why, I was distinctly unfond of Courier, which was the standard printer font for IBMs in the late 1980s.2 Times New Roman was a blessed relief when it became the default font in Microsoft Word in the early 1990s, although by the early 2000s I was heartily sick of it.

If you have any familiarity with academia, you’ll know that Times New Roman is the font of science. This is presumably a legacy of print publishing and the fact that the typeface quickly gained primacy after the Times commissioned it in the 1930s. If your goal is to cram as much text as possible on the page whilst maximising legibility and retaining a serif profile with ‘classic’ pretensions (you can’t get more classic than Roman, right?), Times New Roman is the font for you.

Today, my dislike of Times New Roman is so great that I refuse to employ it when writing papers, reluctantly changing the font to Times New Roman prior to submission if the journal requires it, which many still do. This often causes problems on co-authored papers, because if I receive a draft in Times New Roman, I’ll often change it to whatever font I’m currently favouring,3 much to the bewilderment of my co-authors.

The book design course I completed as part of my master of publishing in 2016 attuned me further to fonts and the science of typology. After reading The Elements of Typographic Style, I gained a new appreciation for fonts like Futura, a 1927 typeface developed in Germany by Paul Renner that still looks strikingly modern today. Its UK counterpart is Gill Sans, a 1928 typeface created by the British sculptor, artist and typographer, Eric Gill.

Interestingly, Gill Sans is now the subject of fierce debate amongst typographers. Unlike Papyrus, this doesn’t relate to reviled characteristics of the font itself but Gill’s own proclivities. As Gill’s biographer discovered,4 he was a sexual deviant so extreme that no one—not his sister, nor his two daughters nor, indeed, the family dog, escaped unscathed. For this reason, some have argued that the font, although typographically pleasing in its own right, should be abandoned.

What these debates point to is the politics of fonts, a phenomenon that continues to play out in a variety of contexts. For example, although the US State Department has historically favoured Times New Roman, in 2023, the Biden administration switched to Calibri due to its greater declared readability. Once installed, the Trump administration switched straight back to Times New Roman to ‘restore decorum and professionalism’. This points to the fact that whatever fonts are, they are far more meaningful than we typically assume.

The graphic communication scholar Sue Walker has argued that the study of language in social life—an area of longstanding interest to anthropologists—should include typography. This is because our understanding of texts is clearly mediated by the form in which information is presented to us as well as its content. For instance, we all know that text typed in ALL-CAPS is basically equivalent to shouting. Indeed, court rulings have occasionally hinged on this meaning. In a 2014 custody battle settled in the UK High Court, a father’s tendency to use capital letters and large fonts in emails to his children were used as evidence of his insensitivity.

Despite these complex social meanings, typography is sadly understudied by anthropologists, although the work of the linguistic anthropologist Keith Murphy represents a key exception. As Murphy observes, language is experienced in various modes, including speech and text. But text is different from speech insofar as it has a material and visual dimension. In Murphy’s words, ‘it actually exists embedded in a rich stratigraphy of non-neutral forms’. These include the material the text is written on, the rules around how words are presented (punctuation, capitalisation, etc.), the typeface used, and the graphic layout, all of which influence how we interact with the text.

A perfect illustration of how these elements affect meaning can be found in the business card scene in Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho, which plays out in pretty much the same way in the film. In the scene, a group of investment bankers are comparing business cards that look basically identical. However, through their combination of fonts (‘Silian Rail’), paper weight and colour (‘that’s bone!’), and features like watermarks and embossing, the cards serve as markers of social status and distinction—i.e., metaphorical dick measuring.5

Over the past decade, there has been a growing body of work on the psychology of fonts and the ways they influence perception. As the graphic designer Sarah Hyndman notes in Why Fonts Matter, ‘Type influences what we read and affects our choices because we all instinctively understand what it is communicating to us, and we have been learning to interpret the references all our lives.’ For this reason, we notice when there are discontinuities between the font employed and the meanings we associate with it, and appreciate it—even unconsciously—when it aligns with our expectations.6

Murphy has explored various ‘fontroversies’ that speak to the problems that occur when there is a mismatch between fonts and our expectations surrounding them. The best known examples relate to the internet’s most hated font: Comic Sans. Developed by Microsoft in 1995, Comic Sans was designed as an accessible, comic-book style font for novice computer users. Despite its design limitations (e.g., poor kerning, uneven letter weights), it soon became ubiquitous as a less formal alternative to Times New Roman for everything from missing pet posters and bake cake sale ads to birthday cards. As Design for Hackers notes, ‘the story of Comic Sans is not that of a really terrible font, but rather of a mediocre font, used incorrectly on a massive scale.’

In 1999, the satiric website Ban Comic Sans was set up by two graphic designers to highlight particularly egregious uses of the font. To quote the 2009 version of the site,7 ‘These widespread abuses of printed type threaten to erode the very foundations upon which centuries of typographic history are built.’

The most controversial usage of Comic Sans unquestionably occurred in 2012, when it was employed on a slide presentation at a particle physics conference to report definitive proof of the existence of the elementary ‘God’ particle. The confirmation of the Higgs boson, as the particle is named, was major news in its own right, serving to indelibly alter our understanding of the subatomic world. But the choice of Comic Sans to present the discovery offended the sensibilities of scientists and font nerds everywhere.

The response was immediate and hostile, and the Twitter commentary came thick and fast: ‘aaaaah comic sans ruins science forever’; ‘presenting your god particle research with it is like playing J.S. Bach on a ukulele’; ‘Can’t take research seriously if it is in comic sans’. The controversy was so great that it threatened to overshadow the discovery itself in the subsequent media coverage (like this and this).

As Murphy observes, the widespread criticism of the scientists’ use of Comic Sans revealed an assumption that there should be a match between a particular kind of discourse and the graphic system used to represent it. In his words, ‘this stance posits that the typeface used to present a specific discourse genre should iconically match the genre and its attendant associations, and in doing so the typeface itself should fade from recognition.’ Indeed, if they’d stuck with tried-and-tested Times New Roman, the presentation wouldn’t have garnered a second glance. It was the incongruity of the font that made it visible.

This same incongruity was again highlighted the following year when the Vatican used Comic Sans in a 62-page online photo album to commemorate the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI in light of his imminent retirement. Naturally, the folk at Ban Comic Sans were incensed, along with graphic designers across the globe. To quote a snarky contemporaneous article in Salon, ‘considering the decadence of the papal retreat, Castel Gandolfo, one would think the Vatican would have more dough to spend on a Web designer.’

In Why Fonts Matter, Sara Hyndman argues that ‘Fonts turn words into stories.’ But they mostly do this without announcing their presence, which is why their significance as storytellers is largely invisible to those outside the world of typography and graphic design. In general, fonts only announce themselves in their failures, by jarring us out of the story we’re expecting to read. Thus, while it’s said that all fonts have a time and a place, when it comes to Comic Sans, that’s presumably once upon a time, in a land far away.

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Anyone who regularly uses transit will have cause to hate one particular item: backpacks. The scenario I’m referring to can be encountered pretty much anywhere in the world with access to public transit. Someone wears a backpack onto a crowded bus, train or flight, oblivious to the nuisance it poses to those around them. They whack heads as they turn, they crowd the people sitting or standing directly behind them, their backpack gets caught in closing doors.

I’m pretty sure this last situation is to blame for the lengthy addition to my commute last week, which was a good 20 minutes longer on Thursday than the 70 minutes it usually takes me to get to work. I’d hopped on the tube and was waiting for the train to depart when the doors closed and then reopened. For anyone who lives in London, you know this is a sign that someone’s bag or coat has been caught in a closing door. Sure enough, the driver made an announcement a few seconds later. ‘Dear customers,’ he began.1 ‘Someone has just run onto the train, causing their bag to get stuck in the door. I’m going to have to reset the doors, which will take some time. It’s very important that you do not try to enter the train when the doors are closing.’

As we all knew the drill, everyone sighed and settled in to wait. Meanwhile, as the doors were still open, more and more people began to pile on the train, which is usually not terribly full at 7.45 in the morning, being the end of the line. Eventually, with the train now about as crowded as one ever gets in London during the morning rush hour,2 he made another announcement. ‘Dear customers, the doors will be closing shortly. Please ensure that your bags and coats are clear of the door. I’m very sorry for the delay, but this was due a customer in carriage number four entering when the doors were closing and their bag getting caught in the door, which has caused us a 15-minute delay.’3

Everyone held their breath, the doors closed smoothly and we were on our way. Unfortunately, the train was now so crowded that there wasn’t much room for people to get on at the next stop. However, it was clear the driver had decided this trip was going to be a teachable moment because we got another announcement. ‘Dear customers,’ we heard again, in a somewhat more strident tone. ‘Please ensure that all bags and coats are away from the door and please do not try and enter the train. I cannot leave the station until the doors are clear. Please be considerate of your fellow passengers, because someone in carriage four has already caused a lengthy delay.’ He continued in this vein at virtually every stop, berating us for the repeated infractions with bags and coats.4

Meanwhile, in my train carriage, a woman wearing a backpack that can only be described as brick-like (rectangular, rigid and made of leather) repeatedly crowded the poor woman standing directly behind her, who looked annoyed but said nothing. ‘I wonder if I’m in carriage number four’ I thought to myself.

***

Although we experience a variety of irritations on transit, backpacks are widely considered to be the most annoying. For example, according to a survey by the Japan Private Railway Association reported in Japan Today in 2018, bag placement etiquette was voted the most inconsiderate behaviour on transit, exceeding even talking in loud voices, manspreading, and refusing to move when the doors open to allow other passengers on and off. Notably, concerns were not primarily related to people putting their bags on seats (i.e., she-bagging), but rucksacks carried on the back or shoulder bags slung at the side.

While I don’t necessarily disagree with the assessment, what makes backpacks anthropologically interesting is that the issues they cause have very different roots from most of the annoyances we experience on transit. As I’ve previously discussed, many behaviours we find irksome relate to people treating public space like private space: using their phones without headphones, doing their makeup, and so forth. Failures in backpack etiquette, on the other hand, stem from an entirely different source—a lack of spatial awareness. Of course, the result is the same insofar as you still impede on other people’s space, albeit in the most physical of senses, but the origin is different.

If you’ve ever carried a backpack on transit, the chances are high that you’ve worn it inappropriately at some point. (I know I have.) But this says more about the nature of backpacks themselves than the people wearing them. Backpacks are a distinctive object because they are designed to conform to the human body.5 Writing about backpacking, the communications scholar Tracy Stephenson Shaffer has argued that this ‘intimate connection to the body’ is what makes backpacks fundamentally different from other types of luggage.6

According to the tourism scholars Neil Walsh and Hazel Tucker, this means that backpacks enable certain kinds of movements and confine others. For instance, bending over with a heavy backpack on is generally unwise.7 Walsh and Tucker also point to the ways in which backpacks transform our posture and carriage—we don’t hold our bodies in the same way when wearing them. As they observe of the experience of wearing one, ‘It took me a while to get used to the heaviness and the awkwardness, to the feel of this thing. I knocked a vase as I turned.’

The issues we experience with backpacks on transit stem from the fact that they are physically connected to our bodies but don’t, for the most part, become part of them. On one level, this seems inevitable—a backpack, being an object, can’t possibly become part of our bodies. However, the work of the French philosopher and phenomenologist8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests otherwise.

In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty explored the significance of the body as the basis of perception. Core to his arguments was the concept of the body schema, which is basically the enduring, pre-conscious sense we develop of our bodies. For example, the fact that we can pass through doors without having to constantly check their width against our own is the result of our body schema.

Interestingly, our body schemas can incorporate parts of the body we have lost, which helps to explain the ‘phantom limb’ sensation frequently reported amongst amputees. But they also can (and often must) incorporate objects. Merleau-Ponty gives a variety of examples of this—like a blind man’s walking stick, which has ceased to be a separate object and has effectively become part of his body as he uses it to ‘sense’ the world around him and thereby extend his perception.

Another example Merleau-Ponty provides is of a woman wearing a feathered hat, who, without any conscious effort or calculation, keeps a safe distance between it and the things that might damage it. He suggests that the woman comes to ‘feel’ the feathered hat in the way that we feel where our hand is. In his words, ‘‘To get used to a hat… or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body.’

This insight hits upon precisely why backpacks are a menace on transit. For the most part, backpack wearers haven’t incorporated their pack into the bulk of their own body. And because of this, they behave as if their body is its regular size, although it has now effectively doubled in diameter. Thus, the problem actually isn’t the backpack itself, but the fact that it remains a foreign object—and, being located on the back, one that’s particularly easy to forget about. In fact, I would hazard a guess that actual backpackers are much better at navigating transit with backpacks on than the rest of us, despite the generally bulkier size of their rucksacks. As the movie Wild illustrates, part of becoming a backpacker is becoming one with your backpack.

This suggests that if you want to wear your backpack responsibly on transit, the secret may well be to wear it more rather than less. Wear it at home, wear it at work, wear it when exercising and you’ll soon be navigating crowded buses and trains without causing whiplash in innocent bystanders. And if you’re not prepared to do that? Then do us all a favour and remember to take the damn thing off and put it at your feet!

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I can’t believe I’m writing this, because my baseline assumption is that anyone subscribed to a Substack called ‘Silent but Deadly’ knows what they’re getting, but if you’ve got a particularly weak stomach, maybe skip this one. At the very least, do not click any links.

You have been warned.

About two weeks ago, I was swimming laps at the local pool when I noticed what looked to be a large piece of dead skin floating in the water as I swam past. It was, and I’m not remotely exaggerating here, at least 5 x 5cm. ‘God, people are gross’ I thought as I swam past.

When I was getting dressed after my swim, I noticed white stuff on the floor of the changing room, but it was only when I went to wipe my feet that I got a look at the soles. Layers of skin were peeling off my feet in huge chunks, making it abundantly clear that the dead skin I’d seen floating in the pool was, in fact, mine. Not only that, I’d unwittingly tracked great hunks of dead skin everywhere.

The culprit for this episode was not a bad sunburn—the only time I have ever experienced anything close to this degree of peeling—but a present my sister gave me for Christmas. I’m not entirely sure why she purchased me a foot peeling mask, or, indeed, why I decided to use it, because the picture on the front was rather startling (see below). Still, I assumed it was exaggerated in the general manner of beauty products, which promise results very far from what they actually deliver. It therefore came as a great surprise to discover that this one did exactly what it said on the packet.

I must confess that I didn’t actually bother to read the instructions advising that it ‘exfoliates calluses and dead skin in 7-10 days’. In fact, I remember being disappointed when I took the foot mask off, because the soles of my feet looked unchanged—although they did tingle a bit.1 But exactly eight days later, my feet looked like the aftermath of an incident with a blow torch—if anything, the packaging downplayed the level of skin peeling I experienced. Moreover, the soles of my feet continued shedding at a disconcerting rate for the next two days. No matter how much dead skin I scrubbed off, it kept right on flaking. Each day when I took my socks off, they would be full of chunks of dead skin.

Until this episode, I’d not given much thought to skin off the body, although the anthropologist Mary Douglas discussed it as one of a number of culturally charged marginal substances, along with hair, nail clippings, spittle, urine, faeces, etc. However, having given the topic some thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that skin has some rather interesting differences from other bodily matter.

While we have long been obsessed with the colour, texture and adornment of the skin, we don’t tend to think of it as a substance separable from the body.2 For instance, ask people what our largest organ is and most would probably say the liver. As the biological anthropologist Nina Jablonski writes in Skin: A Natural History, ‘Few people, in fact, think of our skin as an organ of the human body. The word “skin” doesn’t bring to mind the same meaty image as the term “liver” or “pancreas”, nor does it elicit the same queasy response.’ However, unlike our heart and kidneys, we don’t have to worry about our skin failing, because it constantly renews itself. While the liver has some regenerative capacities, it doesn’t hold a candle to skin.3

Skin has other intriguing properties, primarily because it’s the core interface through which we experience the world. Far from being impervious barriers, our bodies literally unite with the world around us through our pores and the nerve endings on our skin. Indeed, this is another reason why skin is anomalous. Mary Douglas argued that the body’s margins—i.e., its points of entrance and exit—are often highly culturally charged. ‘We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolise its especially vulnerable points’, she advised. But skin is typically not perceived in this way, although it, too, is permeable.

Despite its appearance of solidity, our outermost layer of skin is constantly renewing itself—we shed millions of skin cells every day. But foot peeling masks, sunburns and trips to Korean bathhouses aside, we mostly shed it in microscopic volumes—helped in part by the hundreds of millions of microorganisms that live on our skin and feed on the dead cells. However, the volume does start to add up—something evident whenever you clean the bathroom and think ‘How on earth did it get so dusty in a week?’ As the National Geographic video above highlights, much of what we think of as household dust emanates directly from our bodies.

Probably the main exception to the general invisibility of dead skin is dandruff. Still, despite Listerine’s best efforts, we tend to think of it more as a minor social embarrassment than as actively repulsive. Certainly, it’s not disgusting in the way, say, snot, or even body odour, is perceived to be. Who can forget4 Ally Sheedy making ‘snow’ with her dandruff in the film The Breakfast Club? While the scene confirms the quirkiness of her character, it reads as funny rather than revolting.

As a general rule we seem to find skin off the body intrinsically fascinating—at least when acquired naturally, rather than through the efforts of serial killers or those skilled in the art of anthropodermic bibliopegy (binding books in human skin). The fascination seems to start young, given children’s interest in putting glue on their fingers and then peeling the resultant ‘skin’ off—something illustrated in the opening credits of the film Amelie.

Our collective fascination is also attested to by skin videos on YouTube and TikTok. By ‘skin’ videos, I don’t mean porn, but footage of dandruff being scraped off scalps, scabs being picked and pimples being popped. According to the BBC, these videos are so numerous in volume that they basically constitute their own genre.

Notably, skin videos are very different to those of people farting or picking their noses, which primarily take the form of ‘gotcha’ moments—mostly of celebrities caught in the act (like this and this). Skin videos, on the other hand, mostly involve disembodied close-ups inviting viewers to watch the process of deflaking scalps, picking scabs and popping pimples as a pleasurable sensory act. Indeed, most of these videos are filed under ‘ASMR’.5

Sadly, the widespread fascination with removing skin debris hasn’t really been analysed, except when it reaches a pathological form. However, there are passing suggestions that it’s connected with the self-grooming behaviours of our primate relatives. This would certainly help explain why many people can’t resist picking scabs,6 despite the fact that removing ‘nature’s bandage’ merely slows down healing time.

Still, I think it’s also about the remarkable properties of skin itself—especially its capacity for regeneration and the irresistible image presented by seeing our bodies literally born anew. As the poet Harryette Mullen writes, ‘I slough off deadscales, flick skinflakes to the ground. Shedding toughness, peeling layers down’.

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This post comes to you a week later than expected. This is mostly because I was in the final push to get the full draft of a book done (it’s done!) but also because I kept getting distracted by cat videos on YouTube. Happy New(ish) Year.

While I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a dog person, it’s no secret that I’m a fan of cats. One of the many fascinating things about cats is how polarising they are. As the anthrozoologist Sarah Brown observes in The Cat: A Natural and Cultural History, people don’t tend to be indifferent towards cats. They either love them or vehemently dislike them. In essence, if dogs are ‘man’s best friend’, cats are probably our best frenemy.

As Tiffani Howell, a psychologist specialising in human-animal relationships, notes of the plight of people who live in dog-loving countries, ‘While it’s not unusual to hear people talk openly about hating cats, it’s less socially acceptable to express a dislike of dogs’. Conversely, it’s perfectly appropriate to write ‘must love dogs’ on your online dating profile, but ‘must love cats’ is clearly code for ‘raging psycho’. After all, to love cats is to place oneself in the company of crazy old ladies and supervillains.

Interestingly, Europeans’ love-hate relationship with cats seems to have very old roots. According to the historian David Engels’ Classical Cats: The Rise and Fall of the Sacred Cat, felines were worshipped in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome due to their associations, respectively, with the goddesses Isis, Artemis and Diana. However, attitudes turned in the Middle Ages. It wasn’t just witches who were hunted; cats were massacred too.1

Cross-culturally, we see evidence of similarly ambivalent attitudes, Japan being a case in point. As Zack Davisson outlines, while there is considerable evidence of Japan’s love of cats, Hello Kitty and maneki neko (lucky cats) being prime examples, the country’s folklore is nevertheless full of stories of monstrous and mischievous supernatural cats. These include the bakeneko—magical cats who can take human form, sometimes by consuming their owners2—and the corpse-stealing kasha, along with numerous other creatures and legends.

The anthropologist Ellen Hertz suggests that cats’ uncontrollability lies at the heart of both their veneration and loathing. While dogs can be readily trained, you can’t really get a cat to do anything it doesn’t want to. This is precisely why we know so much less about cats than we do about dogs—felines are notoriously difficult to conduct experiments with.

According to an article in Science, in the first study comparing how well cats and dogs understood people pointing towards hidden food, cats performed just as well as dogs—when, that is, they could be arsed participating. Unfortunately, various cats ‘dropped out’ (to use the language of the experimenters) of the study, by either ignoring the researchers or wandering off. Subsequent studies point to similar problems. For example, Hertz reports that in a 2020 study on whether verbal cues affect cat behaviour, 21 of the 68 potential cat subjects simply refused to cooperate and only seven completed all four stages of the experiment.

Of course, it’s precisely the independent-mindedness of felines that is part of the attraction they hold for cat lovers. As the writer and cat lover Mark Twain3 once said, ‘Of all God’s creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat’. However, this independence means that cat owners can never be sure that they’ve claimed their feline’s affections.

For example, in an article about neighbourhood conflicts over pet cats in London, the journalist Sirin Kale reports on a couple who were waging a legal battle to prevent a neighbour from stealing their Maine coon, Ozzy. They accused the neighbour of repeatedly attempting to ‘seduce’ their cat by feeding him. Although who is seducing whom is often a little unclear in these situations, given that the neighbour had replaced Ozzy’s cat collar with one containing her own phone number and the words ‘My home’, the accusation does seem justified.

Still, the neighbour’s defence was telling. ‘He is very loved and well cared for and he is very attached to his territory, and to me’, she wrote. ‘Surely leaving him where he is determined to be and where you can be reassured he is settled and happy and healthy is the best thing for everyone involved, both feline and human’. ‘He is not your cat and we are not just giving him over to you!’ the irate owners responded. Whatever you might say about dogs, it’s difficult to imagine anyone challenging a dog-napping charge on the basis that the dog had ‘chosen’ them.4

As the anthropologists Jessica Lynch and Christopher Kelty observe, ‘Humans (as cat owners will attest) do not control cats, and cats are not domesticated in the sense of being dependent on or under the control of humans or directed to specific tasks’. Indeed, they argue that the domestication of cats has been partial at best. Unlike dogs, cats are able to move back and forth between feral and tame states, suggesting that they’ve resisted full domestication of their genetic traits and biology.

Although there is archaeological evidence that cats have willingly interacted with humans for at least 10,000 years, cats were domesticated around 4,000 years ago—much later than dogs. Indeed, Felis catus, the contemporary house cat, remains very biologically close to wildcats.5 Domestication syndrome—the term for morphological and behavioural changes resulting from artificial selection—is far less pronounced in cats than dogs. The prevailing view is that this is because we didn’t actually domesticate cats; instead, they voluntarily came to us once we settled down in villages, because villages meant food stores and food stores meant rodents.6

In fact, some scholars have argued that the adaptations made by domesticated cats seem to be those that maximise our domestication. According to Hertz, a widely held view is that cats possess ‘baby releaser’ traits characterised by a round face, big cheeks, large, forward-facing eyes and a small nose that enhance human attention and focus—nicely illustrated by Puss in Boots in the Shrek films. Still, Lynch and Kelty argue that while cats seem to be ‘preadapted for extreme cuteness’ in human eyes, these traits predate human evolution and are more about maximising hunting effectiveness.

In contrast, the cat’s meow does seem to have evolved primarily as a means of communicating with humans. All cat owners are familiar with the insistent cry their pet makes when they want something (food, attention, to be let into a room or, conversely, outside of it five seconds later). Indeed, as I noted in my last post, the cat’s meow is explicitly likened to a baby’s cry in Korea. Notably, cats rarely meow to each other in the wild. Cats, in a very real sense, have thus cultivated us to meet their needs. In this respect, they differ radically from dogs.

Although dogs are more popular globally than cats as pets, Ellen Hertz observes that cat videos are far more popular than dog videos. Indeed, they are amongst the world’s most viewed materials—Hertz cites figures suggesting that cat videos constitute around 15% of all internet traffic, indicating that they’re even more popular than porn. Her tongue-in-cheek name for this phenomenon is ‘cat-based Mass Enjoyment through Online Witnessing’, or ‘cat-based MEOW’ for short.

The prevailing view is that the popularity of cat videos can be explained by the aforementioned cuteness of felines to human eyes. In this view, to quote Hertz, ‘It would seem that cat-based MEOW boils down to human hardwiring gone astray’. But she suggests that our fascination resides in the unique kinetic and aesthetic qualities of cats, something evident in the different genres of cat videos, like dancing cats, surprised cats,7 cats pushing things off surfaces and stalker cats.

Indeed, what is striking is how different cat influencers like Maru—‘the most famous cat on the internet’—are to dog influencers like JiffPom and Doug the Pug. Before his recent death, Maru’s videos frequently focused on his extraordinary ‘meltability’. JiffPom’s and Doug the Pug’s videos, on the other hand, mostly feature them dressed in human clothing and engaging in human activities.

In the end, I suspect that this tells us something significant about our relationship with cats and dogs. If dogs are prized for the ways they are like us, cats are adored (and reviled in equal measure) for the ways they are different. Mark Twain says it best. ‘If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat’.

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I have recently been on the hunt for a maneki-neko—a Japanese lucky cat—for my sister, who has a large collection of them. During the search, I became intrigued by the history of lucky cats in Japan, in part because cats have long been considered unlucky in neighbouring Korea. When I was doing fieldwork in Korea in the late 1990s, cats were not common pets and people considered them to be bad luck—I was told that the sound of a cat meowing was like a baby’s cry.

Although things have changed in Korea over the past thirty-odd years, cats nevertheless tend to polarise people in a way that dogs don’t. This seems to be a virtually universal phenomenon, including in Japan, which has long had a love-hate relationship with felines. Having decided to write about this topic, it soon became abundantly clear that this was not the sort of piece I could knock up in a couple of days. Thus, inspired by a recent post by the writer Tom Cox, I’ve written below about the key cats in my life—you’ll get the anthropological account after Christmas.

CC the Wonder Cat

The first cat I ever loved was CC, who is remembered in my family as ‘CC The Wonder Cat’. The nickname was a product of his general awesomeness and the fact that he was not actually the first CC we owned, so a more specific identifier was required.

You see, when I was ten, my parents finally relented on their no-pet policy and allowed us to get a cat, which we named ‘CC’, short for Charlie Chaplin. I think my mum would have given in sooner, but my dad only weakened when we were presented with the prospect of a free kitten (as the folk at Temu have since worked out, my dad is a sucker for freebies).

CC#1 was alright, I guess, although he was no CC the Wonder Cat. The latter was the result of an accident that befell CC#1 about a month after we got him. Neither my sister nor I witnessed the incident, as we were both away at the time, but apparently CC jumped onto a low-slung chair just as my dad sat down heavily, with predictably tragic results. He suffered from a broken pelvis (the kitten, not my dad) and poor CC#1 had to be put down.

Now, full credit for what happened next must go to my younger brother. Although I don’t think any of us were terribly attached to CC#1, in part because we had him for such a brief period and in part because he mostly just hid from us in cupboards, I can only assume that my brother’s performance upon CC#1’s death was Oscar-worthy.1 This is because he somehow managed to guilt my father into the unthinkable: purchasing CC#2 at great expense from a local cattery.

A blue Burmese, CC#2 was small and grey, which is where his resemblance to CC#1 ended. Still, my parents, presumably being of the view that a grey kitten is a grey kitten, initially tried to pass off CC#2 as CC#1 when my sister and I returned, despite the fact that it was very clearly a different cat.

Upon learning of CC#1’s untimely death, I was upset for all of ten minutes, but it was immediately clear that CC#2 was an upgrade on CC#1 in every respect. Smaller and smarter, cuter and cuddlier, it was like we’d crashed our Peugeot and somehow landed a Corvette. A ‘brick wrapped in silk’ is how Burmese cats are often described, and there’s no question that CC#2 was a very striking cat. Exquisitely petite, he had a sleek build with a beautiful grey coat and bright green eyes that my brother and father, contrary to all objective evidence, insisted were yellow.

CC the Wonder Cat was everything the best cats are—an adorable sociopath. The king of the local cat territory, he got into frequent fights to maintain dominance in the neighbourhood. Although a proficient killer of birds and mice, he was nevertheless extremely affectionate. He did the rounds every night, moving from bed to bed, so that we all got to spend equal time with him. Still, you pissed off CC at your peril, because he would always seek revenge. This mainly took the form of him lying in wait on the stairs and pouncing on your head as you walked past underneath.

From the day of his arrival until his death nine years later at the hands of a cat baiter,2 the first words out of our mouths when we got home were always ‘Where’s CC?’ A mad scramble to find him would then ensue, along with endless arguments about who got to hold him first and for how long. Although I was the least physically violent of my siblings, I would stand my ground over CC.3 We were all devastated when he died.

Spike

Spike was the first (and last) cat I owned as an adult and the feline love of my life. A red Burmese named after my favourite Buffy character, I organised for a friend of mine in Townsville to purchase him from the same cattery where my parents had purchased CC all those years before, and from whence her own equally awesome brown Burmese had come. Given that I was living in Sydney at the time (over 2,000km away), this was an extravagant decision.

Spike was three months old when I picked him up from the airport and I fell in love with him on the spot. My husband was away when Spike arrived4 and by the time he returned, Spike was firmly ensconced in our household and on the bed. In fact, his favourite spot to sleep was on my husband’s pillow and he did not take kindly to my husband’s head being on it. During the night he would manoeuvre himself onto the pillow and my husband’s head progressively off it, so that my husband would wake up pillowless, and with a crook neck.

Spike’s second favourite spot to sleep was behind my arse,5 thereby ensuring that I was trapped in the same position all night for fear of squashing him. In summer, he’d sleep above the covers. In winter, he would tap the blankets to be let under the doona, but he’d soon get hot and move to my husband’s pillow for some air, only to tap to be let back under the covers when he got cold again—a scenario repeated multiple times a night. Although he’s been dead for 12 years, I sometimes still find myself lifting the covers for him, having felt a phantom tap on the blankets in my sleep.

My siblings were always unfavourably comparing Spike to CC. Spike was clearly crossed with a tabby, they said, and was tubby to boot. Spike shed incessantly, they claimed, and had a perpetually pooey arse. It’s true that CC was objectively more handsome—Spike was an indoor cat and built along less svelte lines. And his arse was indeed pooey,6 a fact I was forced daily to confront because he would constantly stick it in my face when I was trying to work on the computer. But what my siblings never understood was that unlike CC, Spike was a one-person cat, and I was unquestionably his preferred person. His favourite spot in the world was my lap and everyone else was a paltry substitute on the occasions when I was unavailable.

One day, a Facebook account under the name of ‘Spike Wondercat’ appeared. Facebook Spike was, well, catty. He sent friend requests to everyone I knew and made rude comments on their profiles. Everyone thought I had set up the account and my adamant disavowals only made me look more guilty. Eventually, my brother admitted to being the culprit.

The best of all cats, there was only one problem with Spike. Somewhere between CC and Spike, I had become seriously allergic to felines. I realised this within minutes of meeting him, because my eyes swelled up like golf balls. But love had struck and there was no way I was going to give him up.

Although the most acute symptoms did resolve, I soon developed severe asthma and sinus problems. At the time, I convinced myself that it was due to the dampness of the old house we lived in in Sydney. Still, the problem intensified when we moved to Canada (we brought Spike with us at great expense). It got to the point that I would narrowly avert hospitalisation every time I got a cold.

Then, in 2012, I was awarded a fellowship in Switzerland for a few months and for the first time I was away from Spike for an extended stretch. Suddenly, my years-long sinus problems and asthma issues cleared up—I could actually breathe through my nose and walk up a hill without fear of an asthma attack. Still, there’s no way I would have given him up; I was prepared to suffer as long as he was alive.

Just a year later, he was diagnosed with lymphoma. He died in July 2013, two days before my birthday—a story I’ve written about previously. At that point, I knew that my love affair with cats could only continue from afar.

Tilly

Tilly is my next-door neighbour’s cat. A tortoiseshell tabby built on the petite lines of a Burmese, our back garden is firmly within Tilly’s territory. There are currently several encroachers into her space and Tilly is in the midst of a battle to maintain dominance. Despite my general love of cats, my affection for Tilly is such that I diligently go out the back and scare them off if they come onto our garage roof. ‘Bugger off’, I shout. ‘This is Tilly’s territory’.7

Tilly treats our garden like her own, thereby constantly setting off the alarm system my husband has rigged up. She regularly sun bakes on the pavers, she uses the shared fence and our garage roof as her personal thoroughfare, she shits in our pot plants, and she drinks water out of conveniently placed trays. During the summer, if I leave the sliding door open at the back, she will come inside to inspect the kitchen to make sure everything is up to scratch.

Tilly is pretty much perfect, except for the fact that she hates me. I’m allowed to admire her, but only from a distance. If I approach her in an attempt to give her a friendly pat, which I do rather more often than she would prefer, I invariably get hissed at, and occasionally swatted.

There is a certain look she regularly gives me that reminds me of someone I once encountered on a bus in Vancouver. I was minding my own business when a young woman sitting in one of those sideways seats looked me straight in the eye and said pleasantly, ‘I’m gonna cut you, bitch’. Startled, and assuming that 1) I had misheard her and 2) she was talking to someone else, I pointed to myself and mouthed ‘me?’ ‘Yeah, you, bitch’ she responded. She continued to eyeball me for the remainder of her trip, while I sat frozen, convinced that any sudden movement would set her off. To my great relief, she got off the bus a few stops later.8

I hadn’t thought of her in years until I met Tilly. Still, given the severity of my allergies, I figure Tilly’s doing me a favour by avoiding me. Although it’s now eight years and counting, I nevertheless live in hope that she will one day warm to me.

Honorable mention: Archie

Archie was an orange cat who lived a few streets away from us. I stumbled across Archie by accident about four years ago when I took a different walking route home from the bus stop one day. There he was, perched on a brick post in front of a pink house that I assumed he lived in, meowing imperiously for my attention. I could tell he was old—he’d reached the age where he was less fastidious about grooming himself, and he had that slightly cloudy look in his eyes that ageing cats often get.

I stayed for a good five minutes patting him and he soaked up the attention, meowing plaintively when I left. The next time I walked home from the bus stop, I took the same detour on the off-chance that I might encounter him again. Sure enough, there he was. Naturally, from then on I changed my walking route home—allergies be damned! Archie would always be there waiting for me on his post, meowing aggressively for a pat and mournfully when I stopped.

Now, I have to say that I was under the distinct impression that Archie and I had a Special Bond. Sadly, this assumption was rudely shaken about a month later, when I greeted Archie with his usual pat. To my surprise, a guy walking down the footpath stopped next to me and said ‘Archie’s great, isn’t he’. (This is how I learned Archie’s name.) He then stood there, clearly expecting me to move on so he could give Archie a pat. Slightly disconcerted, I left. Archie didn’t bother with his customary parting meow—he was too busy being loved up by the stranger.

Then, a week or so later, it happened again. I was patting Archie on his post when a woman and her young daughter walked up. ‘Archie! Archie!’, the little girl cried, literally jumping up and down with excitement. They, too, stopped, making it clear that my time with Archie was once again at a premature end.

At this point, I was starting to get the impression that my relationship with Archie was like Theodore’s relationship with his AI programme, Samantha, in the movie Her. In fact, I’m pretty sure that after the second encounter, I wore the exact same expression as Theodore when he learns that Samantha is ‘cheating’ on him with 641 other people.

It turns out that Archie was quite possibly the sluttiest cat in existence. I soon learned that he was being visited by dozens—possibly hundreds—of neighbourhood locals. Sometimes when I went to see Archie, I would have to wait in line to pat him, especially if school had just got out. At a certain point I realised that he came out to his petting post each day between roughly 4-6pm, having intuited that this was the time of day that passersby were most reliably abundant.

The full extent of his popularity—and the utterly indiscriminate nature of his affections—was revealed upon his death about a year later. His owners kindly placed a laminated note on Archie’s usual perching post informing people that he had died and thanking us on Archie’s behalf for the attentions his legion of fans had bestowed upon him over the years.

***

In the end, I think it’s clear that while cats might hold a culturally ambiguous position, my own attitude towards them is unabashedly positive. I am, and have always been, a cat person. Why do I like them more than dogs? Anthony H. Euwer says it best: ‘Some Cats they cough, and some they weeze, / And some’s afflicted by dizeeze; / Some Cats is blind, and stone-deaf some, / But aint no Cat wuz ever dumb’—Christopher Cricket on Cats, 1909.

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A question that virtually all women have mulled at some point in their lives is ‘Have I got blood on the back of my clothes?’ And there comes a time in most women’s lives when the answer to that question is ‘Why, yes, I do’. The first time it happened to me, I was 14 and wearing a bright yellow netball skirt—a colour arguably exceeded only by white in its capacity to highlight blood.

I recall the incident quite clearly because it happened while I was in my school uniform rather than on a weekend, when the mishap would have been far less obvious, given that I was deep in the throes of my short-lived goth phase.1 As I was walking from class, a girl I knew said to me quietly ‘You’ve got blood on the back of your skirt’. Simultaneously grateful and mortified, I rushed to the girls’ toilets where I changed my pad and sponged the skirt off as best as I could—I wore it turned around to the side for the rest of the day.

I thought about this incident last week, when I went to set up the room for a workshop I’d co-organised on campus. Two colleagues were helping me arrange the room when we came across several chairs featuring reddish-brown stains (see below). Based on the colour and positioning of the marks, none of us were in any doubt as to what we were looking at. Clearly, some poor young lass with a particularly heavy period had recently had a class in the room.2

In all honesty, when I saw the chairs my first thought was ‘Ew!’ My second, coming close on its heels, was ‘I hope that poor woman was wearing dark jeans’. And my third was ‘There’s no way in hell that anyone is going to sit on those chairs’. In any case, our course of action was clear: the chairs needed to go.

My solution was simply to swap the chairs with unstained ones from elsewhere on the floor. This way, I figured, they were now Someone Else’s Problem. However, my civic-minded colleague,3 appalled by my lack of consideration, promptly retrieved the chairs, placed them aside with a note on them saying they required cleaning, and then reported the issue to building reception.

Initially, the guy at the reception desk didn’t seem particularly concerned about the prospect of stained chairs, probably because many in the building are already covered in a variety of marks: coffee spills, food remains and whatnot. But my colleague’s clarification that it was ‘woman’s blood’ spurred him into action. Less than half an hour later, a cleaner came up to the floor to inspect the chairs, which disappeared shortly afterwards.

Given that dried blood is a biohazard, we would have responded the same way if the chairs had been covered in blood of any kind. I think it’s also safe to assume that no one wants to sit in a pool of someone else’s dried blood, regardless of its source. Still, there’s little question that adding to our (or, at least, my) disgust was the fact that it was menstrual blood in particular. While many people dislike the sight of blood, menstrual blood is seen to be especially powerful and polluting—as the virtually universal existence of menstrual taboos attests.

Although such taboos are generally taken as a sign of women’s inferior social status, anthropologists dispute the idea that menstruating women are universally seen as impure and unclean. For example, in Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas observed that menstrual pollution was feared as a lethal danger in some societies, but not in others.

This point was taken up by Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb in Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation, where they argue that rather than protecting society from ‘a universally ascribed feminine evil’, menstrual taboos often protect the perceived creative potency of menstruous women. In their view, while menstrual blood tends to be highly significant cross-culturally, its symbolic meanings are far from clearcut.

As both anthropologists and Judy Blume have shown us, the onset of menstruation is highly culturally significant around the globe, even when not marked by formal puberty rites. Whether feared or embraced, every girl knows that the onset of menstruation is accompanied by significant social change, a moment that has no equivalent male counterpart.4 But while menstruation signals fertility, it also signifies the absence of pregnancy—the ‘weeping of a disappointed womb’ is how one infamous religious handbook describes it.

These dual qualities are critical to understanding menstrual symbolism in Anglo-American contexts, which I would suggest is characterised by deep ambivalence rather than an outright revulsion. Indeed, it strikes me that the old joke about not trusting ‘anything that bleeds for seven days and doesn’t die’ might be misogynistic, but it also speaks to the fundamentally anomalous nature of menstrual blood. To quote the author and poet Judy Grahn, ‘menstrual blood is the only source of blood that is not traumatically induced’.

As I discussed in my last post, physicians historically treated the evacuation of both sweat and menstrual blood as highly beneficial to health, although the substances themselves were deemed harmful and polluting in their own right. For example, according to the English studies scholar Jenijoy La Belle, in Shakespearean England, menstruation was defined as ‘a monethly flux of excrementitious bloud’. Its suppression was therefore considered dangerous—the blood was thought to thicken and coagulate, binding up the woman’s internal passages.

But unlike sweat, menstrual blood was an integrally feminine substance. La Belle’s theory is that in the scene where Lady Macbeth asks the spirits to ‘make thick my blood, Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse’, she’s actually demanding that they remove her femininity in a biological as well as psychological sense. The ‘damned spot’ that comes to haunt her dreams is actually menstrual blood.5

Still, that’s not the end of the story, because menstrual blood also became caught up in what Norbert Elias has termed the ‘civilising process’ and the growing threshold of repugnance around natural bodily processes and functions. Notably, this happened not just in relation to our toiletry habits but menstruation as well—over time, both became couched in euphemism and hidden from view. For example, one Australian study of ads for menstrual products over the past 100 years found that it was only in 1974 that the word ‘period’ itself was actually used. Prior to that it was ‘that time of the month’, ‘Aunt Flo’ and ‘the curse’ (although manufacturers of feminine hygiene products tended to avoid that one).

Arguably, this expanding threshold of repugnance around bodily emissions is at least partly to blame for the contemporary embarrassment, mortification and secrecy surrounding menstruation, given that we don’t tend to talk about our bowel movements and urinary incontinence either.6 Still, the end result is that periods are something women are still largely expected to pretend they don’t have—a phenomenon satirised in an old Saturday Night Live ad for Tampax Secrets: the tampon ‘hidden inside other things you’d rather take out of your bag in public’, like ‘dog poop’ and ‘dead mice’.

It’s only in the past decade that norms have begun to change. Kiran Gandhi’s decision to complete the London Marathon in 2015 without a tampon is typically treated as a key moment in shifting cultural norms. According to her blog, she’d got her period that morning and didn’t want to deal with the discomfort of a tampon for 26.2 miles.

Although her decision divided viewers, it also sparked a conversation about the silence and stigma surrounding menstruation. Indeed, given that male marathon runners frequently suffer bleeding nipples7 and female runners have finished races with both nose bleeds and full-blown facial injuries from falls, it’s a little hard to argue (although to be clear, people did) that this was exclusively a ‘hygiene’ issue.

Makers of sanitary products have also begun to move away from depictions of menstruation as something that has to be hidden. For example, Libra Australia’s 2018 ‘periods are normal’ campaign showed menstrual blood for the first time on television, although the consequences were predictable—hundreds of complaints were made.8

Still, while normalising menstruation seems like a worthy goal, I doubt that the ambivalence around it will ever really dissipate. Because at the end of the day, our bodies are never just bodies, they are also symbols. And menstrual blood is clearly the most powerful natural symbol of them all.

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When I first started lecturing 25 years ago, my primary requirement for the clothes I wore on days when I was teaching was their ability to disguise sweat patches. I learned the need for this on my very first day of teaching. My first class of the day was supposed to have 60 students, but something like 75 showed up. I remember walking to the classroom, peaking in the door, and seeing a sea of faces. ‘That can’t be right’, I thought, veering past the room to the women’s toilets, where I proceeded to have a mild panic attack.

Eventually, I forced myself to return and teach the class, where I can confidently say that I gave the worst lecture of my life. First, what was supposed to be a 60-minute lecture was, at best, 20 minutes. I remember looking down at my watch and being horrified that so little time had passed, because I had nothing left to say. But even worse than the fact that the lecture was 40 minutes shorter than I’d intended1 was the fact that my armpits looked like I’d just run a marathon.

This is also the first time I remember sweating copiously from the groin.2 Thankfully, the dark pants I was wearing disguised the latter, because I’m pretty sure I looked like I’d wet myself. But there wasn’t much I could do about the armpit stains, which I recall extending almost to my waist and being extremely visible in the light top I was wearing.3 I remember going to the toilets afterwards to try and surreptitiously dry off my underarms under the hand dryer, as I had another two lectures to give that day.

Over time, lecturing got easier and I no longer felt nervous while teaching, but the excessive armpit and groin perspiration never really abated. To this day, I’m still careful about the clothes I teach in. While I no longer sweat so profusely, I’d rather not put it to the test.

I thought about this experience again recently following the BBC’s coverage of Alan Carr’s discussion of his sweatiness on The Celebrity Traitors. ‘I thought I wanted to be a traitor but I have a sweating problem’, he confessed in the first episode. Much has been made of Carr’s frankness,4 although this is hardly the first time he has talked openly about his perspiration problem (and other bodily excretions).

Still, it begs the question of why sweating is so culturally loaded. As the historian Michael Stolberg notes, ‘Far more than one would expect from a seemingly innocuous, bland, watery fluid, sweat is associated with shame and embarrassment, with pollution and stench, but also with purification, sexual attraction and masculinity’. Sadly, the topic has been largely ignored by social historians—social anthropologists have been just as lax, as Julie Archambault observes.

In her book Skin: A Natural History, the biological anthropologist Nina Jablonski has argued that sweat was critical to human evolution. Notably, we have far more eccrine sweat glands than other mammals. These glands cover almost the entire surface of the human body and are responsible for the sweat that cools the body’s temperature, which is a mixture of water and electrolytes. According to Jablonski, in a very real sense, this sweat made us human:

‘The humble sweat gland thus must assume pride of place in human evolution. Without plentiful sweat glands keeping us cool with copious sweat, we would still be clad in the thick hair of our ancestors, living largely apelike lives. We would never have evolved our hot-running, high-octane brains or our ability to be active and alert even in the heat of the day in the hottest places. No one has composed paeans or odes to celebrate the glories of sweat, but well they should. It is plain old unglamorous sweat that has made humans what they are today’.

In addition to our eccrine glands, we also produce sweat from our apocrine glands. Unlike other mammals, we have relatively low quantities of these glands, which are activated at puberty and concentrated in the armpits and groin. Significantly, the sweat they produce is thicker and fattier than what we excrete from our eccrine glands, and is the primary culprit for body odour.

Although apocrine sweat glands are activated by heat, they don’t have a significant thermal function. In fact, Jablonski suggests they’re more of an evolutionary byproduct. Instead, these glands respond particularly to emotional triggers—i.e., arousal, stress, fear or pain.

Because sweat is triggered by emotion as well as heat, it’s simultaneously the most involuntary and visible of all bodily excretions. Unless things have gone seriously awry,5 faeces and urine don’t typically rain willy nilly from our bodies; nor do snot, saliva, tears and breast milk. Semen, likewise, has a time and a place (well, one hopes). Menstrual blood is obviously an exception, being completely involuntary and occasionally visible.6 Still, none of us have any say (recourse to Botox aside) over the sweat that pours from our pores when we’re hot or nervous. In this respect, our bodies constantly, albeit temporarily, betray us—thankfully, sweat dries quickly, although it leaves lingering traces on our skin, hair and and clothes.

According to Stolberg, European attitudes towards sweat have long been ambivalent. Historically, the evacuation of sweat from the body was seen as highly beneficial—‘suppressed’ sweat was deemed a leading cause of disease, and perspiration was seen to cleanse the body of dangerous and polluting matter. To this end, inducing sweat was both a common form of disease prevention and treatment for illness.

But sweat itself was also associated with pollution and shame. Stolberg notes that when people mentioned sweat in their writing, they did so apologetically—a common practice when writing about faeces and urine. Indeed, sweat and urine were perceived as similar substances. However, sweat was also perceived to be like menstrual blood insofar as both needed to be evacuated from the body to preserve health, but were harmful and polluting in their own right. Indeed, contemporaneous accounts suggest that sweat from a fever was seen to be so acrid that it could erode the skin.

There’s little question that part of this response to sweat related to its smell. Stolberg writes that its stench was seen as confirmation of the ‘harmful, corrupt nature of the waste or morbid matter which the body eliminated by sweating’. Although men were acknowledged to be naturally sweatier7 and stinkier than women, in his 1837 pamphlet on the significance of different types of sweat in diagnosing diseases, the German physician Philipp Klein complained that even pretty young woman sweated from their armpits with a stench that was hard to bear.

Still, the disgust associated with sweat wasn’t due just to its smell, but its connection with animality. After all, horses sweat, men perspire and women glow—as the old saying goes. As I’ve previously discussed in a variety of posts, the sociologist Norbert Elias identified an expanding European threshold of repugnance around natural bodily functions from the thirteenth century onwards, based on a growing European obsession with being ‘civilised’. In this context, ‘One repulses the body, isolates it, feels ashamed of it, tries to ignore it’.

A final feature of sweat was the way it highlighted the porous nature of the body, which was a major focus of humoral theories of medicine and the view that open pores facilitated the entry of ‘bad air’ into the body. Sweat provides a reminder that we have pores—i.e., literal passages between the inside and outside of the body covering virtually its entire surface! This speaks (once again) to Mary Douglas’s observation that bodily refuse is universally seen to be a symbol of power and danger because it traverses the boundaries of the body.

Contemporary Euro-American attitudes towards sweat continue to manifest a deep-seated ambivalence towards the substance, which retains its dual polluting and purifying qualities, although gender remains integral to which side of the spectrum it’s seen to sit on. For example, in their study of Australian men’s attitudes to sweat, the human geographers Gordon Waitt and Elyse Stanes found that perspiration was perceived neutrally—and even positively—in saunas, sports field and gyms. However, in work contexts, men carefully monitored body odour and visible sweat patches in themselves and others. Here, sweat became ‘unprofessional’, ‘discourteous’ and ‘dirty’.

Based on her research on women’s running groups in Mozambique, the anthropologist Julie Archambault has highlighted the significance of context to our experience of sweat. Context, she writes, is key in determining how we respond to another’s sweat. On a sports field, where sweaty bodies intermingle after a match, it speaks of camaraderie. On a bus seat, it speaks of invasion—as anyone who’s ever sat down in a pool of someone else’s sweat can attest.

Still, the contexts where it’s acceptable for women to sweat remain more restricted than for men.8 Public saunas and steam baths are fine, but many women are still uncomfortable with sweating excessively in gyms—if all the ‘Sweating at the Gym Women’ TikToks admonishing women not to be embarrassed about it can be taken as gospel. As Archambault notes, the recent shift in attitudes towards women’s sweat seems to have primarily come about as a result of changing female bodily ideals from ‘skinny’ to ‘strong’. However, women are still more likely to be sweat-shamed than men.

This isn’t to say that men aren’t shamed for sweating at the wrong time or place. Male politicians are often a particular target. For example, in his 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly drew attention to Marco Rubio’s ‘disgusting’ sweating during the live Republican nominee debates.

In sum, we really do sweat the small stuff, including the most ubiquitous of all bodily secretions itself. But while few of us might be inspired to write paeans to perspiration, the story of sweat is nevertheless the story of our lives. In the words of Hannah Della Bosca:

‘The hormonal sweat of menopause, the stinky sweat of adolescence, the sickbed sweat of fever and infection, the healthy sweat of exertion and exercise, the laden sweat of sexual desire. The nervous sweat of anticipation. The clammy sweat of sudden fear. The enveloping sweat of dense humidity. The cleansing sweat of a sauna. Cold sweats. Hot sweats. Sweat is a story that contains multitudes’.

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In my last post, I focused on our tendency to anthropomorphise food. But what I didn’t mention was that we don’t just attribute animate qualities to vegetables, we attribute them to everything. Thus, while we might be prone to seeing Jesus’ face in potatoes, we’re also wont to spot it in clouds and hills. Heck, the Messiah’s visage has even been spied in greasy frying pans and foetal sonograms.

The technical name for our tendency to make meaning out of random images is pareidolia, although it’s merely one aspect of our broader proclivities to see patterns in the world around us. This general phenomenon has been much discussed in ‘smart thinking’ books like Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, which both discuss our tendency to see causes, patterns and intentions in randomness.

One example Kahneman provides of this tendency is a famous psychological experiment by Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel in which they created the above film and asked viewers to explain it in their own words. Viewers of the film consistently see the large triangle as an aggressive bully that menaces the smaller triangle and terrifies the smaller circle before they join forces to defeat it.

For Kahneman, this is evidence of ‘fast’ thinking at work—i.e., snap, intuitive and often misleading judgements. ‘The perception of intention and emotion’, Kahneman writes, ‘is irresistible’. But, he informs the reader, Heider never intended viewers to believe that the large triangle is really a bully. ‘Heider’s triangles and circles are not really agents, it is just very easy and natural to think of them that way’.

The problem is that the triangles and circle actually are agents in the experiment, as Heider’s biography makes clear. In his words, ‘As I planned the action of the film, I thought of the small triangle and the circle as a pair of lovers or friends and I thought of the big triangle as a bully who intruded on them’. Basically, you’re looking at Harvey Trianglestein.1

The entire point of the experiment was to understand how behaviour influences the perception of intention without facial cues to draw on. To quote Heider and Simmel, ‘instead of presenting faces with the exclusion of the situation, we have presented situations and activities without the face’. In effect, Heider and Simmel wanted to see if they could anthropomorphise geometrical shapes. Lo and behold, they could—and with an extraordinarily high degree of consistency in terms of how viewers interpret them. Indeed, Japanese studies have found that viewers interpret the symbols in much the same way.

The fact is that our impulse to anthropomorphise may well be instinctive, but it’s also conscious and volitional. How else are we to explain the Victorians’ preoccupation with making vegetables look like humans?

A good example of this tendency can be found in the 2000 film Cast Away, starring Tom Hanks and Wilson, his volleyball-cum-companion. Wilson begins in pareidolia—Hanks’ character (Chuck) sees a face in the bloody handprint he has left on a volleyball after he cuts himself badly while trying to make a fire. But Hanks then consciously decides to transform Wilson into a companion. He knows Wilson is a ball. We know Wilson is a ball. But everyone gets invested in Wilson anyway.2

Upon the film’s release, audiences reacted so strongly to Wilson that the ‘character’ won the Broadcast Film Critics Association’s newly minted (and never since bestowed) Best Inanimate Object award. Audiences’ continued investment in Wilson is evident in the sheer volume of YouTubers who have videoed themselves watching the scene in the film where Hanks discovers he has lost the ball.3

George from Cinebinge seems to sum up the general view when he says, ‘Of all the things I could be doing today, I don’t think that being heartbroken for a volleyball was on the list’. This suggests that our impulse to anthropomorphise is far more interesting than simply instinct at work. It’s not just that we unconsciously anthropomorphise. We intentionally anthropomorphise as well, even when we know it’s illogical. Basically, we can’t seem to help ourselves.

One of the most ambitious attempts to understand this phenomenon is the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie’s Faces in the Clouds. Far more influential outside anthropology than within it, Guthrie’s core argument is that we are all animists and anthropomorphists at heart. In his words, ‘Humans see boulders as bears, flying pieces of paper as birds, and stuck drawers as wilful’. Intriguingly, he suggests this phenomenon isn’t exclusive to humans: ‘cats see fluttering leaves as prey, horses see blowing bags as threats, and dogs hear sirens as howls’.

This continuity between humans and other animals leads Guthrie to posit a biological and evolutionary dimension to our animistic and anthropomorphising tendencies. He notes that in nature, where animals have evolved to mimic plants and vice versa, when in doubt about whether something is alive, it’s safest to assume that it is. According to Guthrie, anthropomorphism operates on the same principle as animism. In the face of uncertainty about the nature of the world, ‘guessing that the world is humanlike is a good bet’.

Guthrie suggests that this tendency to anthropomorphise carries over into the way we interpret the world—not just the unfamiliar, but the familiar as well. He writes, ‘Whatever we can fit to the human model, we do, until we have reason not to; and we can fit almost everything to it’. He suggests that this is based on a need to interpret things and events with the model that discovers as much significance as possible in the world around us. The pervasive use of anthropomorphism in art, advertising and even science itself, Guthrie argues, is the result of our impulse to interpret the world with a humanlike schema.

One of the most canny attempts to capitalise on this trait is the pet rock, invented in 1975 by Gary Ross Dahl, an out-of-work American advertising copywriter. Accounts of how he came up with the pet rock differ, but it’s typically attributed to a bar conversation in which Dahl joked that rocks made the ideal pet because you didn’t have to feed, walk them, or clean up after them. Based on the response he received, he quickly realised that unlike actual rocks themselves, the idea might have legs.

He purchased a load of Mexican beach stones for a penny a piece and packaged them in a cardboard carrying case, complete with air holes and a soft bed of straw to nestle in. They also came with a set of tongue-in-cheek instructions on how to identify different breeds, care for them and train them. Ads for the pet rock were couched in a similar tongue-in-cheek vein, highlighting its ‘clean and undemanding nature’ and the fact that it was ‘surprisingly easy to train’ and ‘quiet to a fault’.

The pet rock arrived just in time for Christmas of 1975 and was a huge hit. A few months later, 1.5 million rocks had been sold, they were the focus of their own song (‘I’m in Love with My Pet Rock’ by Al Bolt), and Dahl was a certified millionaire. But unfortunately for Dahl, given the ease of selling rocks in boxes, the market was soon flooded with competitors.4 Plus, people could also simply find their pet rock ‘in the wild’—like the child in Bolt’s song.

The success of the pet rock may have been short lived, but it arguably resided in the way it played with the idea of pets themselves. While a rock, being inanimate,5 seems fundamentally different from other kinds of pets, the distinction is an order of magnitude greater when the pet in question is a dog as opposed to, say, a goldfish or a praying mantis.6 In a way, you could say that pet rocks are good to think with. The joke, which we’re all in on, is that a pet rock is funny precisely because it highlights the differences between rocks and pets, and the fact that they aren’t always as great as we assume.

By confronting our need to anthropomorphise, Wilson in Cast Away operates much like the pet rock. Still, I like the ending that Tourism Fiji has recently imagined for Wilson.7 Coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the film, it depicts Wilson washing up on the shore of a Fijian island and picked up by a young girl, whose mother stitches him back together. With his new human companion, Wilson takes in the sights (including the obligatory beach shots and kava-drinking ceremony, this being a tourism ad). The film ends with Wilson taking part in a beach volleyball game, a ball once again.

Further reading

In my last post, I discussed our tendency to depict fruit and vegetables as human. As I mentioned, although potatoes are especially prone to anthropomorphisation, the Victorians were strikingly indiscriminate in the fruit and vegetables they chose to present as men, women and children. Fetching images abound of turnip men, cabbage ladies and sugar snap pea couples. Basically, no fruit or vegetable, no matter how unlikely, was safe from being immortalised in a top hat.1

Go further back and you’ll find similar representations in Renaissance art—most famously, Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s human portraits made of fruits and vegetables. Although these may well have started as innocent caricatures, the paintings were a huge hit with Italian nobility. Indeed, they are the only works of Arcimboldo’s that still circulate widely today.

Personally, I find this tendency to anthropomorphise fruit and vegetables fascinating, primarily because these are, after all, objects that we eat. I, for one, am not particularly keen on the idea of picturing the carrots I’ve just glazed and roasted as a large, happy family. Yet this is a strikingly common strategy in food advertising.

M&Ms are a classic example of this approach, given that ads first featured talking M&Ms in 1954, although the contemporary M&M characters weren’t developed until 1994. As they frequently feature in polls as the most popular candies in the USA, this was arguably a canny marketing decision. Still, it seems a little bizarre that presenting a candy as a sapient life form that wants to be eaten is an effective sales strategy.

I remember first being struck by this phenomenon during an ad for Goldfish snacks that used to regularly play on telly when I was living in the USA in the early noughties. At first glance, it seems innocuous enough. Happy, fresh-faced children and families enjoy Goldfish snacks together, which swim around the screen in badly animated fashion—like an 80s Benetton ad crossed with a budget Finding Nemo.

But the jingle’s lyrics are gleefully bloodthirsty, featuring lines such as ‘the wholesome snack that smiles back until you bite their heads off’. ‘Didn’t that make you feel good about Goldfish?’ the jingle asks, presumably rhetorically, although I would always think ‘Well, no, not really, because you have just shown us Nemo and children gleefully pulverising him to shreds’.

Interestingly, the question of whether we actually want our snacks to smile back has been the subject of surprisingly little academic attention. In fact, the only scholars who seem to have noticed our propensity to animate food are consumer researchers, who’ve argued that anthropomorphising healthy food makes people more likely to eat it and reduces food wastage by making irregular food more attractive—‘Mr. Potato Head fights food waste’ is the title of one of the many academic articles on this topic.

One of the few exceptions is an article proposing the ‘novel idea’ that animating food products might backfire because ‘anthropomorphizing grants the consumption object the perceived capacity to feel pain which increases perceived immorality of consumption’. But even this article ignores the elephant2 in the room: that encouraging people to eat food by making the food appear more human is basically employing symbolic cannibalism as a marketing tool.

The only commentary I’ve seen that grasps the essential ghoulishness of this strategy3 is the film Sausage Party, in which a group of animated food learns the ghastly truth of what happens when they leave the supermarket. The result is a movie that, as one reviewer notes, is ‘only slightly more kid-friendly than Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses’. ‘They’re eating children!’ a sausage cries in one scene, as the woman who has purchased them, having scalped a potato (Irish, of course), decapitated a lettuce and shredded a screaming block of cheese, crunches on two baby carrots.

Although the film’s protagonist is a sausage, it’s worth noting that advertisers are considerably less likely to animate food that was initially animate itself, with some notable exceptions. Indeed, consumer researchers have repeatedly found that anthropomorphised meat products are distinctly off-putting to the public.4

As the anthropologist Nick Fiddes notes in Meat: A Natural Symbol, in Anglo-American cultures, every effort is made to erase the associations of meat with the animals it comes from. For example, the British Meat & Livestock Association has advised butchers,

‘Traditional retailing centres around offering the public bits of animals and often identifies meat with livestock. But modern consumer attitudes shy away from this link… We must make our customers think forward to what they will eat rather than backwards to the animal in the field’.

Although these sensibilities are distinctly contemporary and far from universal, most of us don’t want to be reminded that the meat we are about to eat was once alive.5

Probably the best articulation of this sentiment can be found in Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. In the scene, humans Arthur Dent and Trillian are seated with Betelgeusians Ford Prefect and Zaphod Beeblebrox in the eponymous restaurant when the waiter approaches and asks if they’d like to see the menu or ‘meet the Dish of the Day’. The latter turns out to be an intelligent bovine-like creature, who offers itself up for consumption. ‘Something off the shoulder perhaps… braised in a white wine sauce?’

The Earthlings at the table are appalled. Arthur declares it the ‘most revolting thing I’ve ever heard’ and asks for a green salad instead.

“A green salad?” said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur.
“Are you going to tell me”, said Arthur, “that I shouldn’t have green salad?”
“Well”, said the animal, “I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am”.

Although the space cow suggests that vegetables and animals are equally sentient, it’s clearly their differences in this respect that explain our willingness to anthropomorphise fruit and vegetables and our attendant squeamishness about humanising meat. As Fiddes observes, meat is far more symbolically loaded than fruit and vegetables—something clearly evident in food taboos. For example, in both Islam and Judaism, fruit and vegetables are naturally halal/kosher, unlike meat and fish.

It’s precisely because they are alive at the outset that a variety of prescriptions have arisen on what animals can be eaten and how. Whereas if we have any prevailing view of fruit and vegetables, it’s that they are not animate. Indeed, until recently, when applied to a human, a ‘vegetable’ commonly (if insultingly) referred to someone for whom life had gone, even if the body lingered on.

In some respects, this seems akin to the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s observations about naming practices for animals, which I’ve previously discussed in relation to our6 love of dogs. He argued that dogs tend to be given names that are like those of humans but simultaneously different (e.g., ‘Fido’), while pet birds are given more typically human appellations (e.g., ‘Polly’). Lévi-Strauss argued that this is because dogs are more anatomically and socially connected to us than other pets. Birds, on the other hand, live in a parallel but separate society.

For this reason, a sort of cognitive disquiet occurs when we give dogs human names. Calling one’s pet bird ‘Polly’ is okay because they are clearly so much more different from us than dogs. But calling your dog ‘George’, especially if you know someone named George, well, that’s asking for trouble. In a similar vein, animating fruit, vegetables or snacks is a lot safer than anthropomorphising animal products, because the latter are so much more closely connected to us than the former.

In the end, the story of why we are so prone to anthropomorphising the objects we eat is still to be written, although the rule seems to be that the less likely a snack is to smile back in real life, the happier we are to imagine biting its head off. Still, I can’t help think that our readiness to animate the food we eat suggests that Lévi-Strauss is probably right: we are all cannibals at heart.

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